


Untitled Goose Game

by arboreal_overlords



Series: The Accidental Avian Anthology [3]
Category: Hot Fuzz (2007), Wooden Overcoats (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death, Movie-Level Violence and Gore, No village hoodlums were harmed in the making of this fic, Piffling Vale Murder Cult, Slightly Supernatural Piffling Vale, The greater good, hot fuzz au, rip to Edgar Wright but I'm different
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-01-23 22:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: Eric Chapman was literally the Met's finest. Then, somehow, he ended up transferred to Piffling Vale: a small island full of suspicious “accidents,” creepy townspeople, and homicidal geese. Now all Eric has is a wilting peace lily, an idiotic partner, and a fraying sense of sanity.He will cause problems on purpose.
Relationships: Eric Chapman & Rudyard Funn, Eric Chapman/Rudyard Funn, Georgie Crusoe & Antigone Funn
Series: The Accidental Avian Anthology [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1537618
Comments: 97
Kudos: 214





	1. It's a Lovely Morning in the Village, and You are a Horrible Sergeant

**Author's Note:**

> Thus begins the final chapter of a trilogy of Wooden Overcoats fics in which I apparently hyperfixate on birds. Welcome to the Accidental Avian Anthology! 
> 
> Anyway thanks to Edgar Wright for making Hot Fuzz the romcom of the decade. Please also enjoy the five thousand Untitled Goose Game jokes, because no animal deserves a place in WO canon more. I did steal a few lines/running gags from the movie Hot Fuzz and adhere to the loose plot structure of the movie. Also, I am Very American and have lived for a bit in England, but I was mostly in archives/pubs, so my knowledge of British policing is like zero. Apologies for any inconsistencies. Finally, this fic does not endorse the actual police in any way.

Police Constable Eric Chapman was the poster boy of the Metropolitan Police Service. Literally. There were posters of him in public buildings across London, grinning down at the camera in full uniform and surrounded by a hand-picked group of civilians. 

“THE POLICE ARE HERE FOR _ YOU _” the sign read. “ENJOY YOURSELVES!” 

(Eric had argued that the slogan misrepresented the proper tenor of police services, but it had stood.)

He was also, of course, the figurative poster boy. He could run a sub-six-minute mile, change the magazine of a Kalashnikov blindfolded, and navigate a party bus from Islington down to Lambeth during rush hour. He spoke five languages fluently, including Mandarian and Welsh. He graduated from KCL with a double first in Philosophy and Criminal Justice and, during his tenure in the Metropolitan Police Force, had achieved certificates in judo, crisis mediation, and advanced bird-calling.

The last one is going to be important later. 

Police Constable Eric Chapman was also about to be promoted. He sat ramrod straight in the Chief Inspector’s office, aware of the glass walls and gentle bustle he could see through them. There seemed to be more people in the hallways than usual.

“Eric,” the Chief Inspector said cheerily. 

“Chief Inspector,” Eric said. 

“We’re making you a Sergeant.” 

“I see,” Eric said with a small head tilt, trying to convey gratitude and pleasure without looking too chuffed. He spent a lot of time thinking about the minutiae of his body language.

“In Piffling Vale.”

“I’m sorry, where?”

“Piffling Vale!” the Chief Inspector said heartily, not looking up from his paperwork. “It’s a beautiful island off the coast. Peaceful village, friendly people. You’ll love it there.” 

“I . . . . would prefer to stay in London, sir.”

“Well, that’s the issue, Eric,” the Chief Inspector said, finally looking up at him and folding his hands in his lap. “You see, your arrest record is six times higher than anyone else on the force. That video of you diving into the Thames to save a three-legged dog went viral on Twitter. We’ve had to hire an additional secretary to field all of the complimentary feedback that we receive about you from the general public. You have a fan-run Instagram account.” 

“Those are all good things, sir?” Eric said hesitatingly. 

“Right, well, the thing is: you’re rather skewing the curve for the rest of us. Last week you fixed a broken traffic light by hand in seven minutes.”

Eric nodded intently. “That one was tough but necessary. People don’t realize the importance of public utilities--”

“Sure, sure, but now the next time a traffic light breaks, some other poor sod is going to be on the hook with the public to grab a wrench and moonlight as an electrician.”

“I can run electrical engineering seminars, sir.”

“I don’t think you’re getting the point.” The Chief Inspector said soothingly. “You’re making us all look bad. Not all of us have the vim and vigor to go around diving into rivers for dogs or fixing traffic lights. So, take one for the team and take a bit of early retirement to the country, yeah?”

Eric arose from his seat, slightly stunned. Behind him, through the plate-glass window, a group of uniformed colleagues were smiling and waving cheerfully, mouthing “congratulations,” and producing balloons and streamers from behind their backs. Someone popped a champagne cork loudly, and Eric flinched instinctively. 

_ I don’t understand _ , Eric thought, smiling automatically as several dozen of his colleagues toasted to his rural promotion a little too heartily. He was captain of the precinct intramural judo team and the chess club. He’d been the policeman of the year for six years running! Did people not _ like _ him?

Granted, several of Eric’s exes had signaled that he could be a tad . . . exhausting. 

“You _ corrected _ my article proofs on fourteenth-century medieval theater when I left them on the kitchen table,” Brian sighed on his way out of Eric’s apartment after gently dumping him. 

“Well, your dating of the Towneley Plays was not in keeping with recent scholarship,” Eric had replied earnestly. “Did you really want that kind of error in your tenure review?” 

“Eric,” Janine had said wearily, leaning toward him in a tucked-away table in a coffee shop. “You’re great, but it’s hard to figure out where you begin and all this--” she waved her hand up and down at him-- “this drive to impress the world into liking you ends. Until you find someone who you care about more than being _ Eric Chapman _, I think you’re going to be alone.” 

For the last year, Eric’s only meaningful domestic relationship was with his Japanese Peace Lily. Eric personally alkalized all of its water, since he had read that more acidic pH levels inhibited bloom cycles. 

Eric tried researching Piffling Vale from his deconstructed apartment, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his furniture-striped living room. The results he found were baffling. The village did boast a staggeringly low crime rate; there hadn’t been a murder in thirty years. Several professional photos showed a rustically cobblestoned public square, majestic seaside cliffs, and a small but incredibly dense forest. There was also a fairly alarming Yelp page that interspersed cheery reviews of the village’s rustic aesthetic with tense and cryptic comments about feral owls and uranium poisoning. 

“Well, it’s the internet,” he said bracingly to himself. “There’s a notorious glut of unverified information.” 

* * *

Two trains, three taxis, and a sodden ferry later, Eric arrived on the island of Piffling Vale. It was misting gently as he dragged his suitcase and delicately balanced Peace Lily toward his accommodations, a small apartment that faced the public square. The police station, a dark and slightly crooked building, loomed across the street. Eric’s commute to work would take approximately four minutes on foot. This soothed him. 

Eric spent approximately fifteen minutes unpacking his worldly possessions into the house. It was a sobering process, looking around and realizing that this was all he owned. 

His Peace Lily was already showing concerning signs of wilting. The rain here clearly wasn’t alkaline. 

He sat in the understuffed armchair by his unlit fireplace and listened to the beat of the rain for about seven minutes. 

“Okay,” Eric said finally to himself, grabbing his still-sodden coat from the door hook. “There’s got to be a pub around here somewhere.” 

There was, indeed, a pub, only two doors down from Eric’s apartment. Over the door hung an old and cracking sign of two seagulls, apparently slashing each other to the death with their talons. The inside was dark and lined with weatherbeaten wood. 

“Hello, there,” a middle-aged woman said, eerily backlit behind the bar. “Welcome to the Gull and Jerkin. I’m Tanya. What can I get you?”

“Just a light ale, please,” Eric asked, and slid onto a stool, shaking out his coat. It was so dim inside that he didn’t realize there was a woman sitting two chairs down until he felt the weight of her stare on the side of his face. 

“Well, aren’t you a tall drink of something,” the woman purred, her eyes a little alarmingly fixed on him. “Are you visiting the area?”

Eric cleared his throat. “Ah, no.” he said warmly. “I’m the new Sergeant, Eric Chapman.” He reached his hand across the stools to shake hers. 

The woman, a striking brunette with jewelry that cost more than Eric’s yearly salary, grabbed his hand and used it to pull him closer, causing Eric to nearly fall out of his seat and spill the majority of his beer. “Eric Chapman,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve heard about you.”

“Right,” said Eric, frowning regretfully at his spilled beer on the counter. “I don’t actually run that Instagram page.”

She laughed, a surprisingly loud laugh in that it was obviously fake. “No, silly,” she said, swatting at his arm. “I mean I’ve heard of you here. We have big plans for you.”

“Oh,” Eric said in relief. “Sorry, didn’t mean to toot my own horn. You must be on the village council.” 

“Well, of course,” she said. “I’m Vivienne Templar.”

“Ah, Lady Templar,” Eric said, slipping into his networking voice and patting her arm lightly. “I got your email last week. So good of you to invite me to the latest village council meeting.” 

“We’re absolutely dying to have you,” Lady Templar said. “And please, call me Vivienne. I imagine we’ll be working very closely in the future.” 

“Well,” Eric said, chuckling uncomfortably. “I do consider public outreach to be a cornerstone of law enforcement. A town is only as good as its worst police officer, that’s what I always say!” 

“Oh, I agree,” Vivienne said, suddenly serious and drawing even closer. “I think you’ll be an excellent addition to this village, Eric. You understand the greater good.”

“The greater good,” Tayna echoed, smiling at them from across the bar while cleaning a pint glass. Eric needed to get out of this pub. 

“Sorry,” he said, awkwardly extricating himself from the tangle of Vivienne’s arms, “I just remembered, I’ve got to go water my Peace Lily.” 

Vivienne laughed again, winking like it was a cheeky inside joke of theirs. “You have fun with your lily, Eric,” she cooed. “I’ll see you later!” 

Eric decided to take a scenic loop around the village instead of walking directly home. There were a surprising number of owls around, hooting in the trees. Maybe this is exactly what Eric needed. The important thing was to optimize the positive outcomes of moving to a rural district. The air was certainly clearer, for one thing. Eric’s chances of getting pollutant-related lung cancer had fallen dramatically. The stars were also so much brighter. Maybe he’d take up astronomy, like the banished Galileo. 

Eric was mindfully engaging with the stars when a body fell out of a tree and landed face-first on the ground in front of him with a _ thump _ and a low groan. 

“What the hell?” Eric said, looking up at the tree in case there were any more people stowed up there. 

“Watch where you’re going,” the man slurred, still facedown on the ground.

“Are you okay?”

“I was trying,” the man sighed, turning his face sideways on the ground, “to talk to the owls,”

“I see,” Eric said, which was basically a lie. “Have you, you know, taken anything?”

The man made a face like a disappointed frog. “No,” he said petulantly. “I must have switched mouthwashes. Gotten th’kind with alcohol in it.” 

That was clearly false; the man was profoundly inebriated. “Is there someone I can call for you?” Eric asked.

“No,” the man said, pushing himself up into a crouch with visible effort. “If I die on the journey home, she’ll just embalm me.”

“_ What? _”

“Never have siblings,” the man said solemnly, pointing a finger at Eric as if to impart an important pedagogical lesson. “S’like a pre-made nemesis.” 

Eric tried to take stock of this dim figure in the evening twilight, now that the man was mostly sitting upright and visibly sentient. He was tallish but mostly limbs, like someone had grabbed his hands and feet and stretched him. His hair was dark and wildly tufted, and he had a narrow, pointed face with dark bags under his eyes that looked like small bruises. He was wearing a threadbare brown sweater that was fraying at the edges, and there were leaves strewn throughout his hair. 

“I think I should maybe take you down to the station,” Eric said, pulling out his phone and googling the directions to his new place of employment. 

The man groaned, swaying from his knees to sit hard on the ground again. “Might as well,” he said. “Suppose it’ll ensure that I get to work on time tomorrow morning. Did you know . . . .” he said squinting up at Eric, “you’ve got quite a bit of face there.” 

“Yeah, thanks,” Eric said, hauling the man up and grabbing him around his waist. 

“What a novel mode of transportation,” the man said, lolling his head back onto Eric’s shoulder to look at the trees. His hair tickled Eric’s neck as he hummed a low collection of notes that Eric couldn’t follow as a recognizable song. 

“Don’t get used to it,” Eric grunted. 

“Oh, I won’t,” he said faintly. 

The police station was a small brick building stationed at the corner of the town square. Eric pushed open the door with his foot awkwardly, hearing a cheery chime. An older man was earnestly crouching over an enormous leatherbound edition of the Vulgate Bible behind the intake test. Eric propped his passenger on the far wall, hovering when he sagged slightly. 

“I have a case of public intoxication,” Eric said, flashing his badge at the man, and then looked over at the figure leaning against the wall. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

“R’dyrd” the man slurred.

“Oh, hello there, Rudyard,” the older man at the intake desk said, smiling faintly. “Did you steep your tea for too long again?”

“Is he, you know, a regular here then?” Chapman asked, eyeing Rudyard. 

“Well, by necessity, of course,” he chortled. “Rudyard, just kip in Cell 4, there’s a lad. He’ll be sorted out by the morning. You must be the new Sergeant?” 

“Yes, Eric Chapman. I just came in from London”

“And you didn’t waste any time, I see. PC Wavering.” He gestured at the bible. “I used to be the Reverend in Piffling, actually, but then I got kicked out for refusing to choose an orthodoxy. Now I enforce the laws of man, rather than the laws of God. If you believe in that sort of thing, I mean.” 

“Do I believe in the laws of man?”

“No, I meant the laws of God. Do you practice? I still hold a little non-denominational meeting over by the duck pond on Sundays.”

“I’m afraid not,” Eric replied. “Listen, is that guy still going to be there in the morning? I’ll need to process his paperwork.” 

“Well yes, of course he will,” Wavering said, giving him an odd look. Eric flushed, hoping that he hadn’t offended him. _ Just because Piffling Vale is a small district _ , he reminded himself, waving awkwardly and tuning away, _ doesn’t mean they don’t understand basic procedure. Don’t be a snob. _

* * *

The next morning, Eric lay listlessly in his bed as the sun came up, until it was light enough to justify a morning run. What looked like half the village was already bursting through the town square. He set off on a brisk pace, startled when an elderly woman pulled up next to him on a bicycle, dressed in enormous Wellingtons and beaming. 

“‘Ello, Sergeant Chapman,” she said cheerily. 

“Morning,” Eric responded, trying to look over at her and navigate at the same time. 

“I’m Miss Scruple, the housekeeper for a lot of places in Piffling.”

“I see,” Eric huffed. “Well, I guess you know who I am.”

Miss Scruple hummed, keeping an alarmingly fast pace on her bike despite her apparent decrepitude. “Yes, we’re all happy to have you. Agatha’s having ever so much trouble with those hoodlums.”

“Sorry, hoodlums?”

“She’ll tell you about it, I ‘spose, later. Anyway, off to do the washing-up. Ta!” 

Eric craned his head in confusion at the enormous bundle of laundry strapped to Miss Scruple’s back as she cycled away, speeding past him and down the road. 

“Oh good morning, Chappers!” Lady Templar called out from across the street with a frankly alarming wink. Eric made a vaguely friendly grimace in her direction and picked up his pace, narrowly avoiding a collision with a marble statue of what looked like a Napoleonic general astride a squid. God, this town was weird. 

Forty-five minutes and a shower later, Chapman was ushered into Inspector Desmond’s office for his first official day of work. Inspector Desmond Desmond looked like a garden gnome that had been stuffed into a police uniform; he had a small and pointy goatee and friendly, twinkling eyes. He was loudly, performatively cheerful in a way that probably signaled that he wasn’t very pleased that Eric was there. 

“We’ll do a proper walk-through of the station, introduce you to your new partner, and then you’ll be good to go,” he said. “Unless I’m forgetting anything. NIGEL? WHAT ELSE SHOULD I TELL THE NEW BOY?”

PC Wavering, whose first name was presumably Nigel, rolled his eyes good-naturedly at Eric. Eric suspected that their relationship wasn’t technically confined to the professional realm. “He’s already on his way to arresting half the town, so maybe get him some extra handcuffs and some divine guidance,” PC Wavering said, giving Eric a halfhearted sign of the cross without looking up from his bible. 

“Ah, yes. I forgot to mention, I brought in a man for public intoxication last night,” Eric said. “PC Wavering recommended that I leave him in Cell 4, but I’m happy to process the paperwork now.”

“Well, well, industrious man,” Desmond said, ambling down the hall. “You can go check on that while I get you your own set of keys.”

Eric headed down the hallway toward the holding cells briskly, colliding with a man as he turned the corner. Alarmingly, it was the same man that Eric was supposed to be visiting in Cell 4. 

“What are you doing out _ here _?” Eric asked sharply, before realizing that the man was dressed in uniform. The effect was . . . arresting (Eric reminded himself that puns were the lowest form of humor). Without the sweater and the leaves in his hair, the man looked less like a librarian from Fraggle Rock and more like a severe and troubled detective in a sepia-toned old Hollywood movie. 

“Police Constable Rudyard Funn,” he said, frowning as he shook the hand Eric had lifted to gesture at the cells. “Have we met?”

Eric smiled uncertainly, trying to figure out if Rudyard was making fun of him. “I arrested you last night.” 

“Did you?” Rudyard asked, looking unbothered. 

“You fell out of a tree,” Eric said. “You were trying to talk to the owls. You said that you liked my face.”

Rudyard hummed. “Well, that doesn’t sound like me. The owls are quite mean, usually I stay away from them.” He tilted his head. “Jury’s still out on the face, I think.”

Eric flushed. “Didn’t you wake up in Cell 4 this morning and wonder how you got there?”

“Not really,” Rudyard said cheerfully. “I work here.” 

Desmond returned. “Ah, Sergeant Chapman, I see you’ve already met your new partner.” 

“What,” Eric said. 

* * *

Eric trailed behind Inspector Desmond, still trying to wrap his head around the fact that the man walking next to him, who was at best an eccentric drunkard and at worst a certifiable lunatic, was his partner. He was still humming lightly, though now the melody was fairly distinctive as an eerie minor rendition of a John Phillip Sousa march. 

“Here’s the general bullpen, where we all converge to solve crimes and the like,” Desmond said cheerily before pausing in from the of the door and hesitating. “Ah, you see, most of the young ones on the force were under the impression that we were promoting from within, but the Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard was very, well, _ insistent _ that you were the man for the job. Some of them might be a bit nippy still if you know what I mean.” 

Rudyard snorted behind him. “Georgie might run him over with her motorbike by the end of the week.”

“Right,” Eric said despairingly. “Well, we might as well continue onward.”

Desmond smiled bracingly at him. “That’s the spirit!” he said, pushing open a door and inviting Chapman to lean in the doorway. Two women were sitting around a narrow table, both scowling around steaming mugs of coffee. “These are our two Detectives: Detective Constables Antigone Funn and Georgie Crusoe.” 

“Ah, I see,” Eric said, smiling at them. “So DC Funn, are you Rudyard’s . . . domestic partner?”

“Christ alive, no,” Antigone said with derision. “I’m his sister.” Looking closer, Eric could see the resemblance. Both Funns had uncontrollable black hair, sallow olive skin and bruises under their eyes; they could be distant and less chic members of the Addams Family. DC Crusoe, on the other hand, looked like she could quell a riot before breakfast. Both of the women were smoking cigarettes (which Eric was almost positive was against code) and glaring at him through the doorway. 

Desmond beamed, undaunted by the faces of the two detectives. “We like to say that we have double the Funn in this station!”

“No one actually says that,” DC Crusoe said, extinguishing her cigarette in her coffee mug while maintaining murderous eye contact with Eric.

“Oh,” Eric said, looking back at Rudyard and gesturing at Antigone. “Pre-made nemesis?”

“Exactly,” Rudyard responded, nodding seriously. 

“Well, my condolences, Sergeant Chapman,” Antigone sighed. “It’s not every day one is made to work with the most despised person on the Island.”

“They only think that because no one ever remembers that you’re alive!” Rudyard snapped. 

“Well I’d rather be dead that partnered with you!” Antigone yelled back. Eric looked wide-eyed at Inspector Desmond, who was staring at the ceiling as if nothing amiss was happening.

“My fingers are certainly crossed!” Rudyard yelled back. 

Antigone responded by throwing a trash bin at Rudyard’s head with a snarl. The lip bounced off his forehead with a clang and fell to the floor while Eric stared in shock. 

“Damn it, Antigone,” Rudyard shouted. “You nearly hit Madeline!” A series of high pitched squeaks emerged from his neck, where Eric could see a small, wriggling white body nestled under his shirt collar. 

“Swear Jar, Rudyard,” Desmond said mildly, shaking a very full container over by the window. 

“Sorry, wait,” Eric said, trying to signal a time-out with his hands. “You’ve got a mouse on you.”

“Yes, I _know,_” Rudyard snapped. “Which Antigone should have taken into account if she’s going to lob projectiles at me!”

“Sorry, Madeline,” Antigone said sulkily. “I’ll be sure to aim lower next time.”

“You’ve never seen a bloody mouse before, eh, city boy?” Georgie asked, leaning her chair back on two legs.

“Swear Jar,” Desmond sang again. 

“Of course I’ve seen a mouse before,” Eric said patiently. “But not_ on_ someone. That’s got to be at least three workplace violations.”

“Your face is a workplace violation,” Antigone snapped, face reddening when Georgie smirked at her. “Shut up, I said nothing, don’t look at me.” 

“And speaking of workplace violations,” Eric continued, “should you two be smoking in here? It’s against code. Not to mention, you could be killing us all with secondhand smoke.”

“Oh, I imagine you’ll die of other causes first, Chapman” Georgie said menacingly. 

“Well, Eric, it’s 11:30 on your first day,” Desmond said cheerily. “I think that’s lunch!”

Somehow, of all places, Eric found himself back at the pub, surrounded by his coworkers and their very full pint glasses. Rudyard was the only one abstaining, nursing a hot water and still looking a little green.

“Should you all be drinking at lunch?” Eric asked, looking around worriedly over his cranberry juice. “I did just arrest Rudyard last night for public intoxication.” Rudyard rolled his eyes and mouthed '_allegedly'_. 

“Well, Rudyard’s a lightweight,” Georgie said. “Like, existentially.”

Eric frowned. “That seems hyperbolic.”

“He once _ walked past _ a hash bash festival and spent the next two hours eating toast and talking about his plans to communicate with whales.”

“Those plans were tabled,” Rudyard added, looking forlorn. “I get seasick.” 

“Pity that was the only year,” Georgie continued. “It was a cracking festival. The organizers disappeared; had some sort of nervous breakdown and left for Amsterdam or something.” 

Eric frowned. “Constable Crusoe, I shouldn't have to tell you that Cannabis is a Class B drug.” 

“Yeah,” she said, grinning at him over her beer, “but luckily I’ve got an in with the cops around here.” 

Rudyard leaned toward him “Georgie means that because _ she’s _ a cop—”

“Yes, I understand what she meant, Rudyard,” Eric snapped. 

Wavering patted him on the shoulder sympathetically, opening his mouth to say something but halted when he looked down in confusion at Eric’s shoulder. “I say, Chapman, are you wearing a bulletproof vest?”

“I like to always be prepared,” Eric said. “The first rule of policing is constant vigilance.”

“Wavering chuckled. “Well, you will be popular with the local scout troop!”

“Maybe they can use you for target practice,” Georgie added. Everyone around the table chuckled. Eric smiled gamely, hoping that PC Crusoe was just making a joke at his expense and the local Piffling Scouts were not actually armed. He made a mental note to check about that later.

“What Nigel means to say, is that no one’s going to shoot you in here, Sergeant,” Desmond said. 

“Not a member of the public, anyway,” Georgie grumbled.

The mouse on Rudyard’s shoulder let out a series of high squeaks and he laughed heartily. “Madeline volunteered,” Rudyard explained to the table. Eric stared at him incredulously. 

“Well, she’s not going to, really,” Rudyard assured him. “She’s too small to operate firearms.”

“Inspector Desmond,” Eric said loudly, standing up. “Could I have a word, please?”

“Of course, my boy,” Desmond said, smiling up at him from his chair.

“Alone,” Eric pressed. “In your office.”

* * *

“I’m sorry, but no,” Eric said, pacing back and forth across the threadbare rug in Inspector Desmond’s office. “I can’t underscore how many people have impressed the importance of ‘taking one for the team’ on me this week, but this is too far.”

“Sergeant Chapman,” Desmond said, looking strained. “I’ve known Rudyard and his sister since they were children. I brought the Funns onto the force when their parents died and they needed to close down the funeral parlor. Rudyard is like a son to me . . . albeit a slightly weird son that I didn’t necessarily want, and would like to pawn off on someone else.” 

“He carries a mouse that apparently talks to him,” Eric said. “That’s . . . that’s literally insane.”

“Well,” Desmond said gently, “I mean, no one has been able to corroborate that he _ can’t _understand what Madeline is saying.”

“Okay, but is that something that really requires corroboration?”

“Eric,” Desmond said. “You’ll realize soon that sometimes things in Piffling Vale can be a little . . . odd. Eccentric. It’s best to just let it be. Pretend it’s not happening.” 

“I can’t pretend something isn’t happening,” Eric said intensely. “I’m an officer of the law!” 

“Well, I don’t think there are any laws about talking to mice,” Desmond placated. “Think of it as a kind of K9 unit.” 

“K9 Un— it’s a _mouse,_” Eric sputtered. 

“An M9 unit, then,” Desmond said soothingly. “Look, Eric, it’s just that no one else will work with Rudyard. Even Georgie once locked him in a dustbin. She claimed she was hiding him for his own protection, but he was in there for a few hours.” 

“Yes, I understand.” 

Also, you know, no one here is very keen to work with you either.” Desmond added. 

“Okay, yes, thank you, Inspector, message received.” 

* * *

The next day Eric and Rudyard walked through the village on patrol. It was a beautiful autumn morning as they marched purposefully down leaf-covered sidewalks. Eric had hoped that this morning’s work would help him orient himself in the town and solve several existing questions he was nursing about Piffling. Why did everyone seem to already know him? Who had let an existing police force far into such disrepair? And most importantly— 

“Seriously,” Eric asked aloud, staring at it in horror. “What is going on with that squid statue?”

“Come on, Chapman, stop loitering,” Rudyard snapped, pulling at his sleeve. “We’re six minutes behind schedule. What do you lot get up to in London, calling yourselves policemen.” 

Rudyard, Eric had learned, mostly understood policework as constructing and adhering to ridiculously intricate timetables. “We get bodies on the street on time,” Rudyard had said, tapping his watch. “Justice is built on punctuality!” 

“Okay,” Eric said uncertainty. “Sure, showing up is the first step. But you also have to listen to people, Rudyard, you need to understand how they tick. Why they make the choices they make.”

“They’re people, Chapman,” Rudyard snapped, as they walked down the sidewalk at what was practically a job. “They’re mean and petty and usually throwing fruit at me. I try not to think about them whenever possible.” 

“Okay, we’ll get to the fruit thing later. For now, let’s practice,” Eric said, positioning Rudyard’s shoulders so he was staring down the street towards a cluster of shops. “Why is that man choosing to go in through the back of what looks like his own property? Why is he looking around so furtively?”

“Oh. That’s Sid Marlowe.” Rudyard said disinterestedly. “He runs the local paper. He’s cheating on his wife.” 

“What? How do you know?”

“Oh, Madeline told me,” Rudyard said, inclining his head at his left, where a small tail poked out from under his collar. “The pigeons that roost by his house are horrible gossips.”

“Okay,” Eric said patiently, looking up to the sky and praying for the patience not to snap at him. “But if a mouse hadn’t told you, how might you come to that suspicion on your own?” 

Rudyard frowned contemplatively. “Well, he never gets the morning paper out on time,” he said. 

“What?

“I walk from the station to my apartment at exactly seven fifty every day,” Rudyard explained. “Sid’s newsstand opens at eight, but his presses are still chugging whenever I walk by. There’s no way that he can get them on the stands by eight. It’s a travesty of scheduling.”

“Okay, that's great,” Eric said encouragingly. “So what’s keeping him from editing his paper on time?”

“Because he’s at Lady Templar’s in the evening when he tells his wife that he’s working late,” Rudyard said. “That’s straight from the pigeon’s mouths. Well, beaks. You get it.”

“Wait, Vivienne Templar? Is having an affair with Sid Marlowe?”

“Well, I just assumed the village council meetings were running egregiously late, but the affair is Madeline’s theory, ” Rudyard said, before turning to look carefully at Eric. “Why does that interest you?”

“No, it’s just that she-- well, I was under the impression that she was--I mean, when she talked to me--” 

“Already?” Rudyard said in surprise. “Well, well. You certainly move quickly, don’t you?”

“You’d be surprised,” Eric said, and was taken aback at how bitter it came out. 

Over the course of the day, Eric learned a bit more about his partner, apart from the Antigone-bestowed fact that he was apparently the most despised person in the village. Rudyard had never made arrests for offenses other than littering and cruelty to animals, and had lent his police notebook to his mouse for her ‘manuscript notes.’

“She’s writing a Sunday Times bestseller,” Rudyard informed him, undaunted by Chapman’s disbelieving stare “It’s called ‘Hot Fuzz: Memoirs of a Police Mouse.’”

“Okay,” Eric said, gritting his teeth and ignoring the clear biological and semiotic constraints of a mouse writing a book, “but you need to hang on to your police notebook, it’s the most important part of your uniform.”

Rudyard snorted. “It most definitely is not. It doesn’t even serve as an adequate shield in the event of a mass mob, I’ve tried.”

“I’ve seen a lot of action,” Eric said firmly. “The most important weapon you can have is your ability to observe and record people’s words. You need to learn how to read people.” 

“I don’t need to read people, they tell me exactly what they think.” Rudyard retorted. “‘Get lost, Rudyard,’ ‘I’ll get you someday, Rudyard,’ ‘This is the beginning of a lifelong feud, Rudyard.’”

“Wait, did that last one actually happen?” Eric asked. 

Rudyard blazed onward, ignoring him. “ And please, Chapman. ‘_I’ve seen a lot of action,_’ really. Have you ever even crawled through an air duct?”

“No?”

“Have you ever stolen a machine gun?”

“No.”

  
“Have you ever pushed a man out of a building?”

Eric turned. “Is there a reason all of these questions revolve around the plot of the movie _ Die Hard _?” he asked.

Rudyard blushed. “It was the only action movie that my parents would let Antigone and I watch as children,” he muttered. “They thought that crawling through air ducts was an admirable skill. We had to practice a few times.” 

“Sure,” Eric said, glancing over at him. 

“When I had the opportunity to join the police myself— well, let’s say I thought it would be different.”

“You thought it was going to be all gunfights, explosions, and high-speed chases?” Eric asked wearily.

“No, Rudyard replied, curling his lip. “I thought there would be considerably less _ group work_.” 

Eric laughed, startled. 

“Anyway, I always found that fellow Hans Gruber to be the far superior of the two. Now, there was a man who knew how to make a schedule.” 

“He was a murderous terrorist, Rudyard.”

“Well, there’s always something, isn’t there,” Rudyard muttered. 

Chapman hummed instead of trying to forge a response to that, and groped for another topic. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did your parents die?”

“Oh, house fire,” Rudyard. “Apparently there was an embalming fluid leak that produced a highly explosive mixture in the basement. Antigone and I were on a scouting trip.”

“I’m sorry.”

Rudyard shrugged. “Well. It’s hard to lose one’s parents, but they could be . . .”

“Difficult,” Chapman offered sympathetically. 

“Eldritch horrors,” Rudyard finished. “Oh, here we are, do you want a sherbert dib-dab?”

They had stopped in front of a candy shop with THE BROKEN TOOTH painted across the door.

“Rudyard, we’re on official police business,” Eric reprimanded. “We can’t use this time for personal errands.”

“It’s fine, it’s in the schedule,” Rudyard said, ignoring him. “You’ll like Agatha, she used to be a detective, you can talk about _ reading people _ together.”

Agatha Doyle was a hale woman in her late sixties who spoke surprisingly kindly to Rudyard, which already marked her apart from most of the townspeople Eric had met so far. “Can I offer you some candy, Sergeant Chapman?” she asked, smiling at him. “On the house for Piffling’s finest.”

“Oh, thank you very much Agatha, but I much prefer fresh fruit. You know, they are nature’s candy.” 

Rudyard looked at him with undisguised horror. 

“Well, I see that you won’t be bothering Dr. Edware for any cavity removals, Sergeant Chapman,” Agatha said, handing Rudyard a sherbert dib-dab as he grinned in unrestrained delight.

“Indeed. I heard from Miss Scruple this morning that you’ve had some problems with some youths?” Eric asked, taking his police notebook out of his back pocket with a meaningful look at Rudyard. 

“Oh yes, the village hoodlums,” Agatha said, frowning. “They stole some penny candy and ran out, yelling something about deconstructing the chains of capitalism.”

“Well,” Eric said, making notes, “While I celebrate their interest in Marxist theory, shoplifting is a serious misdemeanor. I’ll look into this.” 

“I like the village hoodlums,” Rudyard complained as they left. “They talk a lot about the permanence of existential dread. It’s soothing.” 

“Still,” Chapman pressed. “We’re officers of the law, Rudyard. It’s our duty to prosecute even small infractions like these. In time, they can contribute to a serious decline in community spirit.” 

“Oh, do we have a community spirit?” Rudyard asked. 

“I don't know, there’s certainly a rustic village aesthetic going on.” 

“Ah, that,” Rudyard said darkly, and didn’t say more for the next few blocks. 

As Chapman sat alone in his apartment that evening, the windows gently rattling from the wet breeze, he opened up his trusty planner. Several dozen pages of closely-packed script and diagrams stared back at him. In his free time, he used to design public outreach programs that he could implement once he had more power at the Met, partnerships with the local libraries and senior meal delivery services. He had them meticulously planned, including relevant contact information, marketing budgets, and roughly-drawn PR slogans.

“I thought you were maybe into bullet journaling,” Janine had once said when she finally caught a glimpse of the pages, looking defeated. “Eric, this is so much worse.” 

Eric can’t bring himself to tear out the pages; they represent so many years of his life, so much of his optimism and drive to rise up the ranks of the Met. Instead, he flipped past them to an open page and marks the date, trying to scale his brainstorming to PIffling Vale. Surely there are changes he can make here too, small projects that can make his tenure a bit more bearable. 

Rudyard is . . . not what he expected, but he’s interesting. Curious, which is important. Eric genuinely can’t predict what he’s going to say next. Maybe all he needs is someone who believes in him. Georgie and Antigone, on the other hand, are clearly sharp but loathe him; gaining their trust will take time. Chapman starts writing, broad observations about the Piffling Police Department interspersed with nuggets of information Rudyard had shared with him, sketches of intergenerational feuds and secrets. At one point, he realizes that he’s drawn a quick sketch of Rudyard’s mouse in the margins, half-emerging from a starched collar. 

Unfortunately, there were two things that would go on to ruin Eric's plans for reforming the Piffling police with quiet desperation. 

The first was a string of gruesome and fatal 'accidents' that would tear the village community of Piffling Vale apart. 

The second was a goose. 

  
  
  
  



	2. I Think I Will Cause Problems on Purpose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! I wrote 3k of Georgie and Chapman bickering and then remembered that I needed a *plot*.

The next morning, Desmond accosted Eric as soon as he walked into the station. “Eric, I’m so glad you’re here!” he said, as if Eric's appearance at 7:30 on a workday was a happy accident.“Not to saddle you with our biggest case on your second day, but there’s something that really needs your attention.”

“Of course,” Eric said intently, his mind already whirring. Sure, maybe his first introduction to the Piffling Vale station had been . . . eccentric. But perhaps it had been an off day. Perhaps all Piffling Vale needed were some key logistical tweaks, and Eric would find himself in the intellectually stimulating and community-oriented workplace he’d always dreamed of coordinating.

“The goose is back,” Desmond said seriously. Rudyard, who had been blowing on a mug of hot water in the corner, straightened up in his seat, looking delighted. “The goose is back?” he asked with sudden intensity. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, he’s been spotted near the Piffling Cliffs.”

“Okay, is this a hazing thing?” Eric asked good-naturedly, looking between them. “I get it, new guy in the office—”

“He ’s deadly serious,” Georgie said, sauntering into the room. “Last month, that goose stole Mr. Codrington’s glasses. While chasing the goose to get them back, poor Mr. Codrington tripped and fell down a well and died.”

“He fell down a _well_?” Eric asked.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you about that,” Desmond said apologetically. “Be a sport and buy a water filter, they never managed to fish him out.”

“That’s not all,” Georgie said, warming to the story. “When Karl Tanner was smoking bacon in his backyard shed two weeks ago, the goose stole his keys. Karl got locked in and died of smoke inhalation.”

“Wait, so this one goose has caused the death of two people?” Eric asked. “Why hasn’t he been captured yet?”

Georgie and Desmond exchanged a guilty glance. “He runs really fast,” Georgie muttered.

“It’s because he’s wily,” Rudyard said, leaning in with his eyes alight. “He’s my nemesis.”

“Rudyard, a goose isn’t a nemesis, it’s a waterfowl,” Eric said severely.

“Oh, you haven’t met this goose yet.”

“Well I’d_ like _to,” Eric said impatiently. “Preferably quickly, before he causes another fatal accident.”

“Well, both of you get on it right away,” Desmond said with uncharacteristic sternness. “The Village Council personally called me this morning to emphasize how important it was that this goose be apprehended. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with that lot.”

“Wait, Desmond,” Eric asked in confusion. “Aren’t you technically _on_ the village council?”

“Well yes,” Desmond said, waving a hand at him dismissively. “I don’t really go to any meetings, I’m usually kept very busy. I heard that they’re letting you sit in on the one tonight though, lucky boy!”

“Right, yes,” Eric said. “I thought it would be appropriate to familiarize myself with the leading voices of Piffling.”

“Ah, you’re in luck,” Rudyard said reverently. “They get the really good biscuits for those meetings.”

“I see,” Eric said, remembering that he had made a resolution last night to try and connect with his partner. “Do you want to come with me?”

Rudyard grimaced. “No, I’ve been banned.”

“Oh, gosh, what for?”

“No one’s really sure,” Desmond said lightly. “But most people’s tolerance for Rudyard is usually about five to seven minutes, so do with that what you will. Golly! Look at the time. You two better go catch that goose, eh?”

“Better you two than me,” Georgie said, throwing her feet up on the table and fishing out a crossword. “I’m great at wrangling geese, but that one is weird.”

“Yes, they told me that you had some sort of bird-calling certificate, eh, Eric?” Desmond said cheerfully. “Between you and Rudyard, you’ll be quite the dynamic duo!”

Eric has no idea how that particular detail ended up on his official CV. He had started bird-watching as an attempt to ‘turn off’ from his job after Janine had dumped him. He had never gotten particularly good at it, but enjoyed the quiet of the outdoors, the excuse to lie quietly in the wilderness and wait in a different kind of stakeout. Birds, though, were too much like humans. They were violent and sometimes needlessly cruel. At one point, he and his instructor happened upon a falcon nest wriggling with new chicks. They adjusted their binoculars and waitedA falcon flew into the nest, but attacked the chicks, dragging two out of the nest and unsteady taking off into a different tree. Eric had stood up, craning his neck towards the remaining movement in the nest.

“Falcons do that sometimes,” the instructor had said gently, pushing him back down into the brush. “They attack their neighbor’s nests if there aren’t other options. You can’t interfere. We just observe.”

Eric has never been good at not interfering.

“I mean, geese weren’t exactly the type of bird that we studied in my course, but I’m happy to give it a go,” Eric finally said, trying for good humor. Rudyard frowned at him and muttered something about amateurs.

“Do we have some sort of lead on the culprit?” Eric added, semi-seriously. “I guess we can’t just go around harassing every goose on the island.”

“Oh, you’ll know when you see him,” Rudyard said seriously.

Georgie leaned on the back two legs of her desk chair and slapped a piece of paper on Eric’s desk. “I’m great at drawing suspect portraits,” she said. “Happy hunting.”

Eric looked down at the paper and frowned at her. “This is just a picture of a goose,” he said.

“Well spotted, city boy”

“Do you think we should get riot gear?” Rudyard asked him as they walked out of the station.

“Good one, Rudyard,” Eric said, chuckling.

Fifteen minutes later, Eric realized that Rudyard wasn’t joking.

“Is that a butter knife?” he asked Rudyard disbelievingly as the two crouched in the bushes. The goose in question (which seemed to be markedly larger than any of the geese that Eric had seen before) honked belligerently. 

“It is noted that the suspect is armed and dangerous,” Rudyard muttered into his radio.

“Put that down,” Eric huffed, batting at Rudyard’s radio. The goose honked again.

“Well,” Rudyard sniffed. “You’re both in quite a mood today.”

The goose waddled toward them slowly. “Okay,” Eric said, “God help me, what is it saying?”

“It’s mostly epithets, at this point.”

“HONK HONK,” the goose said, tilting its head. The blade of the knife glistened in the sun.

“He said, ‘PEACE WAS NEVER AN OPTION,’” Rudyard translated.

“Okay, now you’re just making stuff up,”Eric snapped.

“I am not! That’s what he said!” Rudyard protested. “I’m pretty sure at least, it’s hard to follow when he has a knife in his mouth.”

“Well, tell it to put down the knife and we can . . . figure something out,” Eric said, feeling like a prize idiot.

Rudyard sighed. “Now look here,” he called to the goose. “Chapman says put down the knife and we can negotiate your surrender.”

Eric frowned. “Aren’t you going to, like . . . . honk back?”

“No, Chapman,” Rudyard said, looking at him like a slow toddler. “Because _I’m_ not a goose.”

“Right,” Eric said through gritted teeth. He edged closer to the goose, who hissed and opened his wings, starting to run towards them while half airborne. It apparently had no interest in negotiating its surrender.

Rudyard windmilled backward. “Your witness, Chapman!”

Eric raised his baton in defense, only to have Rudyard flail forwards and grab his arm. “You can’t hit a goose with a baton!” he hissed.

“I don’t have any other weapon on me!”

“Geese don’t have any protective bones or tissue around their internal organs. That’s police brutality!”

“Rudyard, yesterday you suggested that I mace Captain Sodbury to dissuade him from jumping a queue,” Eric snapped. “_Now_ you care about police brutality?”

Both of them ducked as the goose feinted forwards, neck extended and swiping with the butter knife. Eric, who had successfully navigated several crisis negotiations with heavily armed perpetrators, yelped and fell back into the bushes.By the time he emerged and yanked away several small branches that had nearly taken out his eye, Rudyard was several feet away, perched on top of a park bench like an angry cat while the goose ran around the bench, honking merrily.

“Yes, I see how this might constitute as the upper hand,” Rudyard snapped down at the goose. “You may have won the battle, but I will win the war!”

“Rudyard, get down from there!” Eric yelled. “For god’s sake, it’s just a goose!”

“You’ve got to grab him by the neck!” Rudyard shouted from atop the bench. The goose honked angrily at him. “That’s right, I’ve done research!”

“_You_ grab it by the neck,” Eric snapped, but he began to edge towards the goose, hands stretched tentatively outward. The goose dropped its butter knife and began to nip at his hands, at one point catching the skin between his thumb and pointer finger in a painful vise and causing Eric to drop his baton.

“_Ow_,” Eric said angrily and jumped up on the bench next to Rudyard, who was looking at him, unimpressed. “Sometimes a strategic retreat is necessary,” he said defensively.

As if it had understood Eric’s sentiment, the goose made unwavering eye contact with them as it waddled backward and suddenly dropped out of sight over the cliff’s edge, still clutching Eric’s baton in its beak.

“Did it just jump off that cliff?” Eric asked, jumping down from the bench and picking up the butter knife on the ground out of sheer instinctual panic of being unarmed. Rudyard had also dismounted the bench and was ambling forward towards the cliff’s edge without any similar sense of urgency.

“Oh, that clever bastard. Come here, come here!” Rudyard said, gesturing Eric forward until they both peered over the ridge and down towards the waves crashing thunderously on rocks hundreds of feet below. Eric fought off an uneasy sense of vertigo. But there, about fifteen feet down, there was a medium-sized ledge in the cliffside where the goose sat placidly, wiggling Eric’s baton at them in greeting.

“I thought I was the only one who knew about this,” Rudyard said. “There used to be a seagull colony that roosted on this ledge. It’s really hard to see if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“How is he going to get up again?”

“There’s a series of small ledges under it, he could hop down to the beach. Your baton is probably a goner though.” Rudyard suddenly looked pensive. “Do you think if he beats someone to death with it, it would technically be your fault?”

“ Oh shut up, Rudyard,” Eric snapped, and stomped away from the cliff.

* * *

“No luck catching them geese, then?” Miss Scruple asked as Rudyard and Eric trudged through town, streaked in grass and missing several key items of their uniform. 

“It’s just the one goose, actually,” Rudyard corrected petulantly, and Eric wanted to disappear into the cobblestone sidewalk.

Despite his unsuccessful avian encounter, and facing further proof that his partner was an incompetent lunatic, Eric still had to attend the Village Council meeting later in the evening that same day.

The Piffling Village Center was an unassuming stone building with a stately, if slightly worn, interior. By the time that Eric arrived in the central room, there was already a small crowd hovering around a table full of tea accessories and assorted Hobnobs. Agatha Doyle and Miss Scruple were there, as were Bill and Tanya, who seemed to travel as a unit.

“Chappers!” Vivienne Templar exclaimed delightedly, grabbing his arm to steer him through the crowd. “Welcome to our little club. You know Bill and Tanya of course, but this is Sid Marlowe.”

Sid Marlowe was a tall, broad man with a cheerful smile and thinning hair. Chapman remembered that Rudyard had mentioned that Marlowe and Templar were supposedly having an affair, but he really couldn’t sense any energy between the two that wasn’t just civic camaraderie.

“And this is Petunia Bloom,” Vivienne continued, dragging him through the room to stop at intervals. “Petunia, come and meet the new Sergeant! We’re already fast friends.”

Eric politely introduced himself to Petunia Bloom, an older woman who offered him a handful of carnations and a smile. Behind her, a man in a white coat was propped against the table, his face grey and vacant.

“Who’s that?” Eric asked Vivienne, gesturing towards the man.

“Oh, that’s Doctor Edgeware,” Vivienne said dismissively. “Don’t bother him, he’ll only tell you how tired he is, running both our hospitals alone.”

“He’s the only doctor on the island?” Eric asked in disbelief.

“Well it's not like we really need more, no one ever gets sick here. You’ll meet him eventually anyway, he also does the autopsies for the police.”

Eric was about to say that it was concerning that their pathologist looked more like a corpse himself, but Agatha Doyle was calling for the council to take their seats at a round table dotted with official folders and glasses of water. It was already more official than any other civic meeting that Eric had visited in his time at the Met.

“Alright, settle down everyone,” Agatha said serenely. “A special welcome to our guest, Sergeant Eric Chapman.” There was a small flurry of applause and greeting thrown his way. “Yes, we’re very excited that he’s here, and hope that he’ll be a true partner to the Village Council in the future.” Agatha suddenly grew more solemn. “Before we begin, I shouldn’t have to remind you that Jerry has been expelled from the Village Council for his rash and thoughtless actions.”

There was a flurry of murmurs around the table. “What did Jerry do?” Eric whispered to Miss Scruple.

“He was going to make changes to his bakery without applying for any permits or notifying the council,” Miss Scruple whispered earnestly. “Agatha was ever so cross.”

This response seemed to be a bit draconian for some building modifications, but Eric reasoned that in a town so small, refusing to go through the proper channels would alienate you pretty quickly.

“Let Jerry serve as a reminder that we do not work on the Council for our own personal desires and plans,” Agatha said severely. “We serve the greater good.”

“_The greater good_,” the table echoed. Eric wondered why everyone in Piffling Vale seemed to like that phrase so much.

As Agatha continued speaking, Eric noticed the way that she quelled any outbursts before they might begin, speaking clearly and forthrightly and outlining her points with precision. He lamented internally that the most promising cop in Piffling Vale was a shopkeeper.

“And now,” Agatha said, “Vivienne has a few words about our most pressing issue.”

Vivienne clicked a PowerPoint pointer to bring up a slide against the wall, a picture of a normal-looking goose holding keys in its beak. A murmur went up around the table.

“Our nemesis the goose is still at large,” Vivienne said passionately. “While Sergeant Chapman is on the case, I need to impress upon you the threat that this . . . this _avian demon_ brings to our village. No one is safe from its fatal mischief.”

She clicked her pointer again to bring up a seemingly-identical picture of the same goose. Eric tampered down an inappropriate laugh.

“I don’t have to tell you that two of our members, Karl Tanner and poor Mr. Codrington, have already filled victim to this goose. We will not let it claim another! We must have constant vigilance. Constant vigilance! Who knows when it will strike again.”

This whole speech struck Eric as high comedy, but everyone around the table was nodding intently. Sid Marlowe was taking notes.

The meeting petered out after Vivienne’s invective, with only a little chatter about the annoyance of the hoodlums and their anti-capitalist graffiti and some named Marjorie and her bunion troubles. Agatha Doyle came over at the end of the meeting, as members were slowly trickling towards the door.

“Thank you so much for coming, Eric,” Agatha said firmly. “as you can see, we’re counting on you to dispatch that goose as soon as possible. Vivian can get a little carried away, but she’s got the gist, as they say.”

“I see,” Eric said. “Well, not to worry, Rudyard and I are on the case.”

“I’m glad you’re here to keep an eye on Rudyard too,” Agatha added. “That boy needs some . . . “

“Yes,” Eric agreed.

“Indeed. Anyway, I don’t mean to keep you. Dr. Edgeware, Miss Scruple and I have some business tonight on the other side of the island, so we’ll lock up and get all this cleaned up.”

Eric, who could recognize a dismissal when he heard one, said his goodbyes to the council members and strolled out into the night, wondering if he could convince Agatha to abandon the sweets business and rejoin the police.

The next morning, Eric’s attempts for a contemplative morning run were shattered when his phone’s shrill beeping awoke him at five in the morning. Desmond was on the line, his usual cheerful and melodious tone gone.

“Chapman, I need you to get Rudyard and come up to the lighthouse. Captain Sodbury’s dead.”

Eric, still half-asleep, blurted out the first question that came to mind. “Was it the goose?”

Desmond gave a low, serious hum. “No. This was definitely not the goose.”

* * *

The lighthouse of Piffling Vale was a moldering stone tower perched on the precipice of the Piffling Cliffs and surrounded by scraggly forest. The foot of the lighthouse was currently awash with neon yellow police tape and tarps haphazardly strung between the trees, trying to block off the crime scene from the gently misting morning rain.

Eric and Rudyard trudged up the hill towards the lighthouse, the plastic booties over their shoes already growing dark with mud. Rudyard had stuck an additional one over his uniform hat in order to ‘keep dry’, and Eric looked over at it periodically and chuckled.

“It’s practical, Chapman,” Rudyard snapped.

“You look like Toad from Mario Kart.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I resent it.”

Eric had stopped laughing by the time they reached the crime scene, where Desmond, Antigone and Georgie were all standing grimly. Antigone was tentatively holding a camera in her hands, as if she wasn’t sure the corpse on the ground particularly wanted to be photographed.

“Oh, Christ,” Eric said quietly, covering his mouth with his hand quickly. He had seen countless dead bodies in London, between car accidents, murder investigations and the occasional drowning. This still managed to be more graphic. Captain Sodbury was lying facedown on the ground, his shaggy white hair wet and matted. His left leg ended at the knee with a ragged and bloody wound, blood pooling on the ground around him.

“Where’s the rest of his leg?” Rudyard blithely asked, before noticing the closed bear trap several feet away. “Oh! I see, there it is.”

The bear trap was easily a foot and a half wide, with wise, sharp teeth that overlapped like the inside of a shark’s mouth. Eric, who was certified in nine varieties of assault weapons and had never had a single desire to go hunting, felt slightly queasy.

Desmond regarded the bloody teeth of the bear trap. “Quick thought, do you think you could use this to catch the goose?”

“What?” Eric sputtered.

Rudyard frowned. “We’re still trying to take him alive.”

“And, obviously, this bear trap will be detained as evidence, and thus cannot be re-used as a weapon in an active police investigation,” Eric said meaningfully. “Right? Right?”

“Well, reduce, reuse, recycle, that’s my policy!” Desmond said cheerfully, which Eric fervently hoped was a joke. “Alright then Georgie, what are your conclusions?”

Georgie looked down at Antigone’s notes and the two engaged in a quick, wordless conversation that mostly involved pointing at the notebook and a few exasperated growls from Antigone.

“Hunting accident, isn’t it,” Georgie finally said confidently. “Sodbury set off his own bear trap. Nasty way to go.”

Antigone hummed. “It fits with cause of death. There’s a bruise on his head, probably from hitting the ground. He clearly bled out, though there’s less blood around the body than I would expect.”

Rudyard nodded. “Maybe because he was so old, he just had . . . less blood?”

“Christ alive, Rudyard,” Antigone snapped. “You were raised by _morticians_.”

“Barely,” Rudyard muttered quietly. “Look, can we get to the part with the paperwork? This meaty bit—” he waved down at Sodbury’s body— “is not my area of expertise.”

“I’ll call Dr. Edgware and tell him to come get the body,” Georgie said, pulling out her cell phone. “He can do a full exam and tell us whether the blood spatter is inconsistent with CoD, but otherwise I’d say that this is open and shut. Poor guy.”

“Wait a minute,” Eric blurted, unable to stop himself. “Don’t you all think there’s something suspicious about this?”

Four heads swiveled in his direction in perfect synch. Rudyard looked upwards and sighed audibly.

“Yeah, Eric,” Georgie snapped. “It’s suspicious that you’re wasting your time backseat policing my case when you have a goose to catch.”

“It’s not _backseat polici_— look, I’m just saying, where does Sodbury get a bear trap that looks like that?”

“Amazon?” Georgie said drily. “Spooky hunting gear dot com?”

“Are there even bears on this island?”

“I don’t know, Eric. Why don’t you go off into the woods and find out for us?”

“Both of you stop,” Antigone snapped. “Are we going to continue standing in the rain, or would you like to canvas the lighthouse sometime this century?” She held up an old rusted keyring and pointed to the looming frame of the lighthouse behind them.

“Fine with me,” Eric said defensively.

The door to the lighthouse was a massive circular slab of wood that creaked ominously as Antigone unlocked it, turning on her torch so they could see inside. There was a dusty and underused kitchen on the ground floor and spiderwebs strung thickly across the ceiling. It was dark and the circular structure gave the building a claustrophobic feeling.

“Yikes,” Georgie said.

“This is nice,” Antigone said dreamily.

The four of them climbed the circular stairs in close formation, straining to hear any noise. “I don’t think there’s anyone here,” Georgie said, pushing open a door into an unfinished room. All of them collectively gasped.

The room was small and windowless, and was stocked floor to ceiling with the most alarming collections of weapons that Chapman had ever seen. There were automatic rifles laid next to what looked like a harpoon gun, a small basket of hand grenades, and an enormous saber resting against the wall. The effect was something between a black market dealer and a museum of historical weaponry.”

“Well,” Antigone said finally. “I guess we know where he got the bear trap.”

“Is that a cannon?” Georgie asked in delight.

“Georgie,” Antigone said warningly. “You cannot fire that cannon.”

Rudyard picked something oblong up from the pile, grinning hugely. “Chapman, look! Your baton!”

The rest of the afternoon was spent hauling back the assorted weaponry to the (empty, dusty) evidence room at the police station. Rudyard was elbow-deep in evidence forms and blissfully happy.“Chapman!” he called imperiously from his desk. “Come have a look at this and tell me what it is.”

Eric sighed and crossed the room, picking it up. “It’s an early twentieth-century blunderbuss. Perfect condition. You can just look these up on the internet, Rudyard.”

“Yes, but this has the added bonus of inconveniencing you,” Rudyard said blithely while scribbling in the evidence form.

“Of course,” Eric said drily. “You spelled ‘blunderbuss’ wrong.”

“It’s artistic license.”

“That’s not how spelling _works_, Rudyard.”

As penance for wasting his afternoon as a weapons identifier, Eric made Rudyard come to the pub after hours so he could interrogate him about Captain Sodbury. Bill and Tanya seemed delighted to see him— indeed, everyone on the Village Council had seemed delighted with him today, going out of their way to hail him in the road and ask him how his day was going. It was nice to be liked, of course— when being honest with himself, which was rare, Eric admitted that he had a need to be liked that verged on unhealthy— but this aggressive cheerfulness made him wary.

Rudyard responded to Bill and Tanya’s cheer the way he responded to all citizens of Piffling Vale being nice to Eric— that is to say, with angry disbelief.

Tanya walked by and delicately placed astubby lit candle on their table, giving Eric a cheerful smile as she walked away.

“Thanks, Tayna,” Eric called weakly.

Rudyard scowled at the candle. “I certainly never get any of this five-star treatment here,” he said resentfully.

“It’s just a candle, Rudyard. Maybe if you actually bought a drink here every now and then—”

“—I won’t be joining you on your downward spiral, Chapman.”

“The first time we met, I arrested you for public intoxication!”

“An event that we’ve established did not happen, and was probably some dream you had brought on by excessive drinking.”

“I’m going to the bar,” Eric said, standing up and flushing when Rudyard looked at him meaningfully. “Why are you _like_ this?”

Bill was polishing glasses at the bar, looking placidly up at Eric as he approached. “Alright, Sergeant Chapman?” he said. “Terrible business out at the lighthouse today. Light ale?”

“Yeah, cheers Bill,” Eric said automatically before straightening. “Hang on, how did you know about that?”

Bill shrugged. “Viv told me. Everyone on the island’s been talking about it though. Enough to put you off your dinner.”

“Viv— Vivienne Templar told you about this?”

“She’s on the village council, isn’t she?” Bill said, sliding the light ale across the bar. “Got to keep us all informed of the goings-on. It’s part of the greater good.”

“The greater good,” Tanya echoed eerily behind him.

“Well, got to get back to my partner,” Eric blustered, grabbing the ale and trying to bolt without splashing it everywhere.

“You two look cozy,” Bill said, frowning over to where Rudyard was building a small nest for Madeline made of pub mats and napkins

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Eric said unconvincingly. “Once you get past the . . . . everything about him.”

“Watch out for that one,” Tanya said, not bothering to lower her voice. “He and his sister are—”

“—Tanya,” Bill said reprovingly. “We don’t want to talk out of turn to the new Sergeant. What will he think of us?”

Eric looked back and forth at the couple, sensing that they were having a totally silent other conversation that he was not privy to. “Thanks for the ale, Bill,” he said quickly, turning and heading back towards his table, where his partner was sitting with his chin in his hands, deep in conversation with the mouse.

Eric pushed an ale towards him across the table, looking around quickly to make sure that none of the other denizens of the Gull and Jerkin were within hearing proximity. “I need you to tell me everything you know about Captain Sodbury.”

Rudyard looked down at it and wrinkled his nose. “Do they have any hot water?”

“Fine,” Eric snapped, grabbing the ale back draining an impressive amount in one go. He slammed the bottom of the glass down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Rudyard was looking at him with a slightly pained expression.

“Alright Chapman, there’s no need to coerce me. Captain Sodbury. Well, he’s always been around, hasn’t he? Daft old bugger. Liked seagulls, if you can believe that. Awful queue-jumper”

“Okay, so how did a man like that end up owning such a weird arsenal of weapons?”

Rudyard hummed, disinterested. “A lifetime of jumping queues, he must have built up some mortal enemies.”

“Think, Rudyard,” Eric pressed, pushing his palms down onto the tattered remains of his beer mat. “Do you know anything about his history?”

“Chapman, people don’t exactly come to me and spill their life stories,” Rudyard sighed. “It’s mostly ‘ugh, why are you arresting me, Rudyard,’ ‘unscheduled Christmas caroling isn’t a crime, Rudyard,’ ‘you can’t categorize jaywalking as a felony, Rudyard.’”

“Well, you’ve lived here your entire life, haven’t you? When do you first remember seeing him?”

“I don’t know, probably in front of me in a queue.”

“I mean it, Rudyard.”

Madeline squeaked reprovingly in Rudyard’s direction, and he made a face at the mouse before sighing and leaning back in his chair, his face relaxing and growing contemplative in the flickering shadow of the candle. “Mother and Father knew him. My parents didn’t . .. associate with many people, you have to understand. But they knew Sodbury. My mother always used to say that the lighthouse was important, that it needed to be manned. I don’t know why, it’s not as if we have ships happening along this part of the Channel very often. At night, you could see that moving strip of light run across the island and out to sea. I always thought it was odd, that the lighthouse searchlight went out over land as well. When I asked my mother, she said ‘it’s not the sea that we need to worry about.’”

“What did she mean by that?”

Rudyard shrugged. “After that, she reminded me that little boys that put their noses where they didn’t belong would get them chopped off. So, that was the end of that conversation.” Madeline offered several reassuring squeaks and crawled up Rudyard’s arm and back under his shirt collar. Eric semi-successfully tampered down the chorus of_[weird weird weird weird]_in the back of his head and tried to appreciate the act of rodential friendship. He flagged Tanya down for another ale.

“Did you ever see anything at the lighthouse?” he asked.

“Chapman, what the hell would I be doing at the lighthouse? Do I look like a lighthouse keeper?”

“Honestly, my first guess was vampire,” Eric said without thinking, the beer starting to loosen his tongue. “But that might just have been because you had just _fallen out of a tree_ in the middle of the night.”

Rudyard’s face did a twisty thing that happened when he wasn’t sure if he was being made fun of. “Once again, I have no memory of this encounter, so am choosing to believe you hallucinated it.”

“I’d like to think that I’d have better hallucinations,” Eric countered, realizing that he was venturing into dangerous conversational territory and not particularly caring.

“Keep your sordid fantasies to yourself, Chapman,” Rudyard snapped, gathering himself up for a rant that included various invectives about Eric’s hair, general demeanor, and inability to follow a basic schedule.

An hour and several ales later, Eric was goading Rudyard into telling him about everyone on the island and their various grudges against him, with only occasional tangents about Eric’s own malevolent incompetence. Eric was approaching something that he was surprised to call ‘a good time.’ He was learning quite a lot about the villagers of Piffling Vale, aside from their collective hatred of his partner, and Rudyard actually had a really nice voice. It was deeper than you would expect by looking at him, and when he worked himself up into an annoyed frenzy, it practically vibrated with bass.

It thus took longer than it should have for Eric to pick out a detail that suddenly zapped his brain back into policing mode. “Wait, say that again?”

Rudyard looked at him oddly. “The part about being banned from the restaurant for life?”

“No, the part about Vivienne Templar’s husband.”

“Simon? Married to Vivienne? Owns half the properties on the island? Hates me?”

“Yeah, I took that last part as a given,” Eric said. “You said something about him and the lighthouse.”

“Oh, I assumed that he’ll want to buy it now,” Rudyard said distractedly. “Turn it into another French restaurant that I can’t go to. That man has an absolute crusade against mice.”

This seemed like an interesting and relevant detail that Eric was going to have to catalog later, since his brain was having trouble thinking linear-ly right now. “That is an interesting and relevant detail that I’m going to have to catalog later,” he said.

Rudyard looked at him with condescending amusement. “Alright Chapman, time to go before you hallucinate about me some more.”

“That really happened,” Eric said to him earnestly. “M’actually a little worried that you don’t remember it.”

“Sure, sure, come along,” Rudyard said placatingly, herding him like a disgruntled sheepdog toward the door. Eric stumbled a little coming out the door of the pub, shooting Rudyard a thumbs-up when he successfully righted himself.

Rudyard groaned. “Chapman, tempting as it is to let you go stumbling off into the dark and watch you brain yourself to death on the cobblestones —”

“Cheers, Rudyard.”

Rudyard glared at him and continued “—If you die, Desmond might actually find me someone worse to partner with.”

“M’fine, my house is right there,” Eric said turning away and waving at him. “Goodnight Rudyard. No trees.”

Eric walked slightly unsteadily across the empty square, nearly colliding with the statue of a Napoleonic general astride a squid.

“_Weird_,” Eric said to it meaningfully, leaning over and bracing himself on one of the outstretched tentacles. He suddenly noticed that there was a plaque at the bottom of the statue and leaned closer to try and read it, scrubbing at the metal with the sleeve of his jacket.

CAPTAIN SCOTT SODBURY

DEDICATED IN 1830 BY THE VILLAGE COUNCIL OF PIFFLING VALE

BONUM COMUNEM COMUNITATIS

“What? No,” Eric said blearily, wiping his eyes with the other sleeve of his jacket. “That’s not possible.”

* * *

The next morning, Eric strode into the station and slammed a sheaf of stained and crumbling paper onto the desk. “The only record of a Scott Sodbury in the British Navy dates to over two hundred years ago.”

“But those are from the village archives,” Antigone said, scandalized. “Those are sealed!”

“Well, I wouldn’t be an effective police officer if I wasn’t well-versed in the art of lock picking,” Eric blustered. His hair was disheveled and he had the wide-eyed look of someone who was lacking sleep.

Antigone sighed. “You climbed through the bathroom window in the Village Center, didn’t you.”

“Yes, and I regret it so much. I think I bruised my tailbone,” Eric admitted quietly.

Georgie growled. “For the last time, Chapman, this isn’t your case. It was a hunting accident, open and shut. Edgware confirmed that there was nothing off about the cause of death or the volume of blood.”

“Then how does he explain the fact that Sodbury was, to all accounts, two hundred and forty-five years old?”

“He doesn’t,” Georgie said slowly, “because that’s mental.”

“That does seem unlikely, Eric,” Antigone said ruefully. “I knew Captain Sodbury, he was perhaps eighty at the outside, but nowhere near that old.”

“But how long has he been eighty?” Eric pressed, opening up his folder and beginning to lay out different documents. “In 1830, the Village Council of Piffling Vale commissioned that weird squid statue that stands out in the town square.”

“I like that statue,” Antigone objected. “It has a certain eldritch neo-gothic energy.”

“Not relevant. Anyway, it is supposed to honor Captain Scott Sodbury for his services to the nation and ‘his dedication to the greater good,’ whatever that means.”

“So?” Georgie asked. “It could have been his great-great-grandfather or whatever.”

“— But at the same time,” Eric continued, glaring at her, “there’s also the deed to the Piffling Lighthouse that was given to Captain Scott Sodbury in the same year. The year, by the way, that this Scott Sodbury would have been about seventy-three.”

“So, it was passed down through his family,” Antigone reasoned.

“But he never married!” Eric shouted, pointing wildly in the air. “The deed explicitly states that at his death, the lighthouse should pass back to the town rather than be inherited by any members of his family.

Rudyard, who had thus far been listening silently and trading the occasional muttered aside to Madeline, stirred in his chair. “Maybe he’s got a point,”hebegan delicately. Georgie groaned.

“_Thank you_, Rudyard!” Eric shouted.

“I mean, Sodbury always looked pretty much the same to me” Rudyard reasoned.

“Rudyard,” Antigone said drily. “You have the observational skills of a carrot.”

“And so what if the guy was two hundred years old?” Georgie said. “Doesn’t mean he was murdered.”

“But it does make the death suspicious,” Eric argued. “Suspicious enough that we should spend a little more time looking at it!”

“What’s this?” Desmond asked, coming in delicately balancing a plastic cup of tea that nevertheless sloshed all over the rug. “Oh, bother.”

“Sir, Chapman is convinced that Captain Sodbury’s accident was a murder,” Georgie said.

“Hmm. Well, Georgie, I trust you to know what to do there. More importantly, the circus!”

“What?” Eric asked.

Desmond waved two ticket stubs cheerily at Chapman. “The circus is back in town, and I was wondering if you and Rudyard might represent us tonight. It might help take your mind off that troublesome matter.”

Eric frowned. “With all due respect Chief, I don’t think we should be referring to a potential murder as a ‘troublesome matter’”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Desmond added placidly.“I was talking about the goose.”

Eric put this face into his hands. “Sure, we’ll go,” he said, his voice muffled.

“Why are you foisting this on us?” Rudyard complained. “I didn’t join the police so I could socialize with clowns.”

“You picked the wrong partner, then,” Georgie said smugly, holding up her hand to Antigone for a preemptory high five that Antigone ignored, not looking up from her notes.

“We can’t go because Georgie’s ex runs the circus.”

“Antigone!” Georgie protested.

“It’ll be good, anyway,” Antigone added. “I heard the knife thrower is finally learning to avoid her target this year.”

“I beg your pardon?” Eric asked politely.

“Well, what’s the point of _that_,” Rudyard said dismissively.

“Antigone and Georgie, I need to you go down to the Village Center,” Desmond said, ignoring his officers and looking down at a notepad in his hand. “Miss Scruple just called, she thinks they’ve had a break-in through that bathroom window.”

Antigone giggled uncontrollably and after a moment, Georgie joined her, wiping her eyes with a grin. “Sir, I would be honored to investigate that break-in,” she said sincerely. “We will bring the full force of the law down on that culprit.”

Eric put his head back into his hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to god I put in that squid statue in Chapter 1 just to make myself laugh and now it's integral to the plot, I guess. Plot is hard! Hot Fuzz is SO intricately done, I am newly appreciating this now as I clumsily hit y'all over the head with suggestions that PERHAPS it is RELEVANT that RUDYARD DOES NOT REMEMBER meeting Chapman the first time and WHAT IS JERRY UP TO??
> 
> Also: will I ever learn how to correctly spell Vivienne Templar's name/ remember to call Chapman by his first name? Unlikely. 
> 
> I might need to add a fourth chapter, but I promise they'll arrive quicker than this one! Come yell with me about Wooden Overcoats on tumblr @arborealoverlords or just yell with me in the comments.


	3. Peace Was Never an Option

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! A few things:  
I’ve tried to reflect this in the main tag, but content warnings for violence, dead bodies, and gaslighting. Also, there’s a discussion of a character being accidentally drugged without his consent.  
I realize that Georgie comes off as a little overly callous in this chapter— I’m trying to negotiate a balance between the Hot Fuzz character she’s inhabiting and what we know about Georgie in canon. I love Georgie! She’s going to get an interesting arc in this fic! I promise!  
See more about character notes at the end of the chapter  
Also, I’ve mentioned this in previous chapters, but this fic in no way condones actual police violence (or like, the police in general). Hot Fuzz, while a delightful action satire, does lean a bit into the glorification of guns. I’m trying to tone down the more gun-heavy and yay-police-y parts of the plot whenever possible while still using the arc of the movie as a template.

It thus transpired that Sergeant Eric Chapman, while still worrying over the suspicious death of Captain Sodbury and the homicidal goose on the loose, found himself bundled off to the Piffling Circus, clutching one of the tickets that Desmond gleefully waved. They promised a ‘night he wouldn’t forget.’

The tickets were not wrong. Two hours later, Eric sat rigidly in his seat as people began to clear out of the enormous red-and-white striped tent, chattering amiably as if they had not just witnessed several violations of the Geneva convention set to cheery organ music and sparklers. Rudyard lounged next to him, eating cotton candy with morsel by morsel with his fingers like a heron. “What the hell did I just watch?” Eric asked carefully.

“They’re getting better,” Rudyard said cheerily around a mouthful of cotton candy.

“Were the tigers supposed to eat their handlers mid-act?”

“Oh they do that all the time,” Rudyard said casually, waving a tiny piece of cotton candy around. “They’ll get better. The handlers, I mean. That, or there’s a large group of identical tiger handlers milling around here. To be honest, I’ve never bothered to find out which it is. Are you going to eat that?” He gestured to the intact whorl of cotton candy that Eric was holding in a death grip, still grappling with the moment in which an acrobat had fallen from the trapeze into a lake of purple fire and never emerged.

“No, you have it,” Eric said, handing it over and sighing as his partner began deconstructing it with surgical precision. “For god’s sake Rudyard, just bite directly into the cotton candy like everyone else does.”

Rudyard paused, his hands and face stained an electric blue. “I have manners, Chapman,” he said with dignity.

“Tiny man!” A loud and Slovakian-accented voice boomed from across the tent. Rudyard immediately shrank, compressing his spine like a spooked tortoise and holding the cotton candy in front of his face as a defense mechanism.

“Oh, is that you?” Eric asked, smirking and looking down at his partner.

Rudyard looked either nervous or nauseous. It was hard to tell with a blue face. “Brace yourself, Chapman.”

A woman strode towards them, a vision in a red tux coat liberally decorated with lethal-looking spikes. Several elephants ambled behind her placidly, trumpeting and reaching their trunks towards her coat pockets like they were searching for peanuts. Eric couldn’t imagine that they were still hungry after . . . no, it was better not to think about it.

“How is the creepy girl?” Marlena asked in an aggressive monotone.

“Antigone’s fine,” Rudyard said nervously. “She, ah, sends her condolences on the death of your clown. The one with the scarves.”

“Bijou,” Marlena said, nodding. “We shared a deep appreciation for her craft. This is a thing on which partnerships are made.”

“Oh, my condolences,” Eric said earnestly, trying and failing to keep his gaze on Marlena as several circus workmen began to hose down the central platform, which was currently covered in an alarming combination of glitter and human blood. “What, um, happened?”

“Bijou was taken from us in the pursuit of her life’s work,” Marlena said with a combination of dignity and sorrow.

“She was practicing her balancing act and fell off the Piffling Cliffs,” Rudyard whispered. “Petunia Bloom saw the whole thing. Bit of a scandal.”

“What exactly happened between Antigone and Marlena?” Eric whispered back.

“I declared my love for her,” Marlena announced, having apparently unnaturally sharp hearing. “She is a woman of deep creative understanding.”

“Ah,” Eric said delicately, remembering Georgie frowning down at her notes at the station. “So.” He looked Rudyard, who made a confirmatory grimace. “Different scandal,” Rudyard whispered. Marlena scowled at them both.

“Anyway,” Eric said quickly, grabbing the rest of Rudyard’s cotton candy and throwing it in the nearest bin without looking, “we’re just here representing the Piffling Police Service. Thanks for, um, a memorable show.”

Marlena inclined her head in acknowledgment, just as Vivienne Templar ambled past, sneering at Marlena and waving cheerily at Eric.

“Chappers!” Vivienne said, not bothering to lower her voice. ‘Surprised to see you here. Absolute trash, isn’t it.” Eric felt the pressing need to declare his love for all circuses.

Madeline suddenly emerged from Rudyard’s front pocket, squeaking shrilly. Vivienne reared back in disgust and hurried out the tent.

“Yes, I agree,” Rudyard said, handing over his final tuft of cotton candy to Madeline. She grasped the small cloud of blue with both front paws and drew it back down into Rudyard’s pocket, still chittering indignantly.

Marlena looked at them both for a moment. “Tiny man. You. Come with me,” she said, turning and striding towards the opposite side of the tent without waiting for an answer.

“Oh, but do we want to do that?” Eric asked, as Rudyard grabbed his sleeve and started ineffectually towing him across the circus floor.

“_I’m_ not making her angry,” Rudyard hissed. “For god’s sake, Chapman, pick up your feet, it’s like you’ve never seen an elephant step on someone before.”

“I _haven’t_,” Eric replied, strangled. “Who _has_?!?”

Rudyard scrunched up his face at him. “What do circuses do in London?”

They followed Marlena into a small alcove at the side of the circus tent, where striped plastic siding turned into a small wooden building. Dozens of seemingly identical clowns wandered around, cleaning the remnants of banana pie off of their face or concentrating on growing back their eyebrows from the pyrotechnic act. Eric tried not to stare. A few trapeze artists walked baby, miraculously un-charred, which made him feel a little bit better.

Marlena continued past them into a small side office, where she unlocked a desk drawer and practically threw a dense sheaf of papers at them. Rudyard immediately stepped out of the way of their trajectory and Eric caught them awkwardly. 

“Take these,” Marlena said bluntly. “I don’t know how long we have.”

Eric looked down at the sheaf of papers in his hands, frowning and flipping through the first few pages. “Um, Ms.—I mean, Ringmistress— “

“Marlena will do,” she said shortly.

“These are rent dispute papers. We’re members of the police, I don’t know what you want us to do with them.”

Marlena braced against her desk. “You and the tiny man might see what others do not. I like his mouse. You are irritating, but you have good reflexes.”

Eric and Rudyard both stood in a rare moment of unified social confusion.

“Now get out,” Marlena said, gesturing with her head.

“Right,” Eric said.

“Yes,” Rudyard said simultaneously, and the two bolted backward out of the building and towards the rest of the crowd that was beginning the long walk back to the center of Piffling. The Piffling Circus was set strongly apart from the rest of the village, down a meandering dirt path that was pretty much only accessible by foot.

“What do you think that was about?” Eric asked, thumbing back through the papers in his hands.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Rudyard said shortly “And you didn’t get stepped on by an elephant! I think we should chalk this night up to a win.”

* * *

A day and a half later, Rudyard and Eric stood in the middle of a normally busy two-lane road on the edge of the Piffling Wood, waiting in the pouring rain as an unusually pale Constable Wavering walked up to them to impart the news of an early morning car crash.

“One of the hoodlums found it on their graffiti route,” Wavering said, looking down at his slightly soggy notebook. “Probably put the fear of god in him. Or, you know, the fear of something else equally important.”

The car was an early-model Volkswagen bus, cheery red paint peeling slightly. The bulbous front was almost entirely crushed against a large oak, and bodies piled out of the shattered front windshield like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. They were all, eerily, still in uniform, complete with face makeup and rainbow wigs. 

“Oh, my god,” Eric said, taken aback. “How many of them are there in there?”

“Thirty-nine” Wavering said, shaking his head. “All the remaining clowns of the Piffling Circus, I think. Terrible loss.”

“How did they . . “ Eric trailed off, stepping closer to look at the overflow of bodies sprawling on the ground and back at the diminutive Volkswagen. “Surely they weren’t all, um—”

“— wearing their seatbelts?” Wavering asked, misconstruing him. “Not a one,unfortunately. Blunt force trauma, the lot. Looks like both their front tired blew out and they hit that tree at full speed. Dr. Edgeware is going to have a rough few days, poor chap.” He fidgeted for a few moments, glancing between Eric and the gruesome scene of the crash. “So, ideas of how to proceed?”

Eric cleared his throat. “Well, we should get a proper cordon off, screen the remains from public view, close down the road until the ambulance arrives, whereupon we should open a single lane to ease congestion.“

Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Very good.” He turned to two youths in neon vests that looked more like nervous schoolchildren than traffic control, uncertainly standing by a tow truck and trying not to look directly at the pile of fluorescent bodies. “Well, what he said.”

Eric and Rudyard stationed themselves on the road until a battered blue van pulled up. Dr. Edgeware looked out the driver’s window, his face already grey with exhaustion. “Just point me toward the crash.”

“Sorry, where’s the ambulance?” Eric asked politely.

Edgware sighed. “Sergeant Chapman, the ambulance is any car that I happen to be driving.”

There wasn’t much to say to that, so Eric waved him through. Several minutes later, an acid green Aston Martin pulled up to the road, loudly playing Frank Sinatra’s “Bring in the Clowns.” Vivienne Templar rolled down the driver’s window. “Morning, officers,” she purred. “Terrible accident. What a tragic loss for theentertainment community of Piffling Vale.”

Eric frowned. “Lady Templar, do you mind telling me how you know the identities of the persons involved?”

Vivienne shrugged. “ Oh, you know how it is in small villages. Loose lips sink ships!”

“It was a car,” Rudyard clarified, pointing back at the still-smoking wreckage.

Vivienne sighed. “Ugh, yes, very well, Rudyard,” she grumbled, accelerating forward down the road. Eric watched her go, crinkling his nose in distaste at the ’T3MPLAR’ vanity plate.

“I don’t like that woman,” Rudyard said contemplatively.

Eric turned toward him. “Do you think that this has something to do with what Marlena told us?” He asked quietly.

Rudyard immediately paled. “Oh god, _Marlena_ is going to be here,” he said faintly. “Would now be a bad time to quit, do you think?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Rudyard, it was a real question.”

Rudyard sniffed. “You’re the one worried about being stepped on by an elephant. Your funeral.”

Once Dr. Edgware had finally cleared the scene, Eric crouched in the middle of the road, frowning at the skid marks that made a dark, curved smear over one lane. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he murmured. “The tire marks here are way too sudden; if there was something in the road or they hydroplaned, surely they would have applied the brakes, swerved around the road a little more?”

“There were forty of them in a single bus,” Georgie pointed out, walking up behind him and snapping her notebook shut. “Weren’t exactly following traffic safety laws, were they?”

A short woman in a trench coat and a nervous smile edged toward them on the road. “Jennifer Delacroix,” she said, holding out a phone with a recording app flashing on the front. “Piffling FM.”

“Yeah, Jennifer,” George said, not unkindly. “We know who you are. Have you not got an umbrella?”

“Ah,” Jennifer said sheepishly, her shoulders rising protectively over her clutched phone. “I think I left it at home. You know, I just got the news and rushed right here.”

Georgie sighed. “Wait a moment,” she said to Jennifer. “I’ve got one in the car. I’m great at preparing for storms. Anyway, you’ll catch your death out here.”

Jennifer blushed, tucking her trench coat more tightly around her.

“What,” Eric said quietly to Rudyard. “Wait, am I missing something?”

Rudyard hummed, “Yes, an umbrella, but I’m not getting one for you.”

“Why is Georgie _being nice?_”

Rudyard looked oddly at him, but was saved from replying when a flashing squad car pulled up in from of them and Desmond edged out the passenger seat, opening up an umbrella that was decorated with stained glass rendition of the Last Supper in which all of the disciples were holding margaritas.

“Oh, that’s where my umbrella went,” Wavering said musingly.

“Chief Inspector,” Eric said promptly, moving toward him.

“Oh, dear,” Desmond said, hesitantly edging up to the scene of the carnage. “Dreadful accident.”

Eric drew a breath, even as he saw Georgie sigh and Antigone look at him with exhaustion. “Sir, I think these deaths are linked.”

“Linked?” Desmond echoed, surprised. “Linked to what?”

“Linked to the death of Captain Sodbury.”

Georgie growled quietly. “Not this again, Chapman. What do you think happened this time, someone stood in the middle of the road and yelled ‘ahhh’ so that the car would run into a tree? It was an accident. Car accidents happen.”

“Both might me stage staged as accidents,” Eric clarified, gesturing belligerently, “but they show clear signs of tampering or sabotage.”

“Maybe it was the goose,” Georgie grumbled. Jennifer Delacroix, who was definitely not supposed to be in earshot, muffled a small giggle. Eric glared.

The afternoon crawled on as Eric and Rudyard stood sentry at the scene of the accident, getting progressively more soaked in the rain as various Piffling residents idled in their cars to goggle at the wreckage.

“Did you find anything?” Eric finally asked Georgie and Antigone as the two emerged from the scene of the accident again, sopping wet and looking slightly green.

“Yeah,’ Georgie snapped, pushing her hair out of her face. “I was extremely shocked to look at my watch and discover that I should be at the pub.”

Eric glowered at her until she snapped open her notepad with one hand. “Both front tires were blown out,” she reporting brusquely. “Looks like wear and tear and then punctured by something sharp, could be a rock or a pothole. Nothing wrong with the Volkswagon’s brakes or transmission. Dr. Edgeware will have to check the driver for any substances, but otherwise, this is basically what happens when you pack forty people into a car and then hit a tree.”

“Well, are you going to check the surrounding area for rocks or potholes or sticks?” Eric challenged.

Georgie stared at him. “We’re standing in the middle of a forest. There’s nothing _but_ rocks or sticks here. Do you want me to just still around measuring every rock in the Piffling Wood?”

“It’s your job isn’t it,” Eric snapped. “You’re a detective. Detect!”

“Chapman,” Antigone intervened. “You’re not helping.” She waited until Georgie stormed off and then drew closer to the two men."Chapman, what's wrong with you?"

Eric was still fuming. “What’s wrong with me?” He hissed. “What’s wrong with _her_?”

“Well, for starters,” Antigone said, with more direct ire than Eric had seen from her so far, “you arrived and stole her job, and then spent every waking moment trying to undermine her authority, with your theories about murder and your sparkling but severe blue eyes.”

“What,” Rudyard said.

“Never mind, shut up,” Antigone snarled. “The only reason we have a working police department is that Georgie did everything and let Demond take the credit. Could you try to be less of a gorgeous walking bin fire and learn how to work with other people for once?”

Eric frowned as Antigone walked away, darting around the water runoff from the trees overhead like a hesitant shadow. Rudyard hummed. “She usually only saves those insults for me,” he said contemplatively. “She must be really angry at you.” He looked back at the wreckage behind him. “Do you really think that this is a murder?”

Eric ’s shoulders slumped. “I just don’t think that we should rule it out, that’s all.”

Rudyard sighed. “I guess we could look over Marlena’s papers back at the station,” he offered. “Cross-reference them with property sales on the island. I do love a good cross-reference.”

Eric quirked an eyebrow at him. “Are you just trying to get out of here before Marlena arrives?”

“_Yes_,” Rudyard said meaningfully.

Somewhere down the road, they heard a faint elephant trumpet.

“Right,” Eric said quickly, patting Rudyard’s shoulder and fishing for his car keys in his jacket pocket. “Let’s get to work, partner.”

* * *

The next two days were a flurry of research, as the two more or less abandoned their goose-related mission and took advantage of Desmond, Antigone and Georgie’s clown-related distraction. Eric was pleasantly surprised that his partner was actually helpful, even competent at this kind of work. While Rudyard remained an experimental speller and tended to mark dates by the various outrages that someone had done to him rather than the traditional Gregorian calendar, he was very good at drawing connections between members of Piffling Vale.

Eric broke into the Village Archives another two times, and Rudyard looked pained at the state of files that Eric slapped down on their combined desks. “I realize that you’re technically committing a crime in stealing files— for god’s sake, is there _broken glass_ on these, Chapman?— but the real crime here is against the Dewey Decimal system.”

“Or, you know, the murders,” Eric pointed out mildly.

Several hours later, they both sat surrounded by sliding piles of papers that Rudyard insisted was a working system. “So, the Piffling Circus was the only business in town whose property wasn’t owned or leased by Simon Templar?” Eric asked, tapping a pen against his head thoughtfully.

“One of three,” Rudyard said awkwardly around a highlighter that was clutched in his mouth. “Two, if you don’t count the lighthouse.”

“Okay,” Eric said, leaning over him to squint at what looked like a tax record from six years ago. “Can we put together a list of people and businesses in the last few years that left the island and cross-reference that with unexplained disappearances or accidents?”

“Eric!” Desmond called, walking into the mess room from his office. “There’s a call for you from London.”

“Tell them I’ll call them back,” Eric said, his head still bent over the research.

“Ah, very well. Well, Look sharp you two,” Demond said, “there’s been a report of a fire in the station!”

Eric jolted upward, nearly springing to his feet before he saw Georgie and Nigel entering with an enormous lit birthday cake. “Happy Birthday to you,” they sang, slightly off-key but enthusiastic as Antigone trailed behind them, rolling her eyes but looking secretly pleased. “Happy birthday to you! Happy Birthday Dear Funns— “

Eric wilted. “Rudyard, why didn’t you tell me that it was your birthday?”

Rudyard snorted dismissively. “We were busy! It comes around every year anyway and — Georgie, _really_?”

Georgie grinned as she set down a cake decorated with an enormous frosting goose.

“This is_ harassment,_” Rudyard seethed.

“C’mon Rudyard, we’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you,” Georgie said consolingly. “You’re just not laughing.”

“I’d like to point out that it’s also my birthday,” Antigone said testily, “and I agreed to this wretched bird cake for the sake of a joke.”

“Yeah,”Georgie agreed affectionally. “Also, no one’s seen Jerry for ages so I had to convince Nigel to dip into some surprise pastry skills.”

“It’s quite relaxing, actually,” Constable Wavering offered. “Beak’s a bit off, I had a bit too much sherry and thought I’d get creative—”

“Should we be checking in on Jerry?” Eric asked Desmond under his breath.

Desmond waved a hand at him. “I’m sure that if something’s really wrong, someone would contact the authorities.”

“Yeah, but _we’re the authorities_,” Eric said insistently. “Everyone here realizes that _we’re the authoritie_s in that situation, right?” He looked up as Georgie was orchestrating the next round of birthday festivities, which included teaching Antigone how to properly whack a piñata with a baton. The piñata looked suspiciously like him. Rudyard was still sneaking bits of frosting while running outraged commentary on the design of the birthday cake. For the first time, Eric felt less like an alarmed bystander who had walked into a disaster in progress and more like an interloper.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, rocketing out of his chair. “I just need to pick something up.”

Georgie gave him an unimpressed glance, like she should have guessed that Eric was the kind of cad who fled small and intimate birthday celebrations. Eric ignored her and grabbed his coat on the way out the door, flicking on the emergency sirens on the top of his car out of spite more than anything. He squealed to a halt in front of a dilapidated but cheerfully cottage on the outskirts of the Piffling Forest. There was a small, hand-drawn sign on the narrow and easy-to-miss driveway that proclaimed BELLOWS FARM. As Eric silenced his sirens and scrambled out of his car, he could hear the distant low hum of thousands of bees.

“Hello?” Eric called, wandering towards the back of the cottage. “Is anyone here?”

The droning noise intensified, and Eric caught sight of a row of large square containers that looked like central air units, with mesh over the top and thousands upon thousands of blurry grey specks swarming around. At the end of the row was a tall figure in a rubber jumpsuit and frizzy grey hair, fiddling with the top of one of the units in intense concentration.

“Hi!” Eric called. “Sorry, I know you must be closed.”

“You’re Eric Chapman,” the woman said, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’ve heard about you.” She then waved her hand sideways like she was conducting an invisible orchestra, and the swarm of bees swayed to the left, creating a passage of free air that she walked through serenely.

Eric watched in amazement, flinching slightly as bees came to angrily inspect his face. "That's— um— really impressive,” he said.

“They mostly do as I say,” the woman drawled, still advancing toward him with an intense stare. “What d’you want?”

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” Eric said, eying a particularly belligerent bee nervously as it crawled along his uniform collar. “I know you run a garden supply store here as well, and I was wondering if you had any peace lilies.”

“Why?” She barked.

Eric shuffled his feet. “I, um, wanted to give my partner a birthday present?”

Horatia looked at him intently for a moment, and Eric squirmed with the combined effect of her gaze and the several bees that were rooting through his hair. After a moment she made a slight shooing motion with her fingers and all the bees that were lingering on Eric’s body flew away. “You’re getting a plant for Rudyard, then,” she said, sounding both amused and annoyed. “Don’ know if I have anything that hardy.”

“That’s not really fair,” Eric said, still slightly transfixed on the ring of bees that swarmed above Horatia like a nebula of insects. “He takes care of that mouse.”

Horatia snorted. “Madeline takes care of herself. Well, you’ll have to show him the ropes, I guess,” she said, starting over towards a small greenhouse and gesturing him to follow her.

Eric trailed Horatia into a snug and warm greenhouse, the air misty with humidity. Horatia was standing contemplatively in front of a rack of lilies, trailing her fingers along their leaves. Eric noted that she had enormous hands.They cradled each plant in turn, as if conferencing with them to choose the best candidate. “This one,” Hoartia finally said, gently picking up a squat lily and handing it over to Chapman.” It’s got a dark disposition, but it’s tenacious. Tell your partner I’m sorry about his parents. Terrible people, but it wasn’t done right.”

“Oh,” Eric said cautiously, taking the lily from Horatia and holding it gingerly. “I didn't realize that you knew them.”

Horatia gestured dismissively, an action that sent a fair cloud of dirt into the air. “You stay on this Island long enough, you get to know everyone,” she barked. “You’ve already had a run-in with my cousin. Piece of work.”

“Have I?” Eric asked, confused.

“Viv,” Horatia said disdainfully.

Eric looked at her in surprise. “Lady Templar is your cousin?”

Horatia snorted. “She wasn’t a lady before if that’s what you thought. Fell in with the wrong crowd.”

“Oh, you mean her husband,” Eric said eagerly.

Horatia was looking at him oddly. “Yeah, something like that,” she said.

“So you know Simon Templar?” Eric pressed. “ I’ve been looking into some of his business dealings on the island.”

“Simon’s been trying to buy this land from me for years,” Horatia said, turning to repot the peace lily. “Wants to turn it into some sort of farm to table restaurant nonsense. I told him I already had a farm and tables.”

“That’s what Marlena said,” Eric replied, scribbling furiously in his notebook. “Well, Marlena's documents. He tries to use rent hikes or village ordinances to push people and businesses off their land.”

Horatia snorted again. “He won’t try that with me. He’s squirrelly, but he’s scared to death of the bees. Plus, he’s off in Australia right now on some deal. Good riddance.”

Eric held up his hand, practically vibrating with excitement. “Hold on one second Horatia,” he said, backing towards the greenhouse door. “I’m going to call the Chief, and I need you to tell him exactly what you just told me.”

“Alright,” Horatia said, looking at him a little oddly. “I don’t know what you think Desmond’s going to do.”

“Trust me,” Eric said confidently, running our the door and towards his car. He grabbed his cellphone from where it was resting in the console and turned around, just in time to see a figure in a dark hooded robe standing behind Horatia as she cleaned up the repotted peace lily.

Eric shouted something— possibly Horatia’s name or just a garbled collection of distressed sounds. Horatia looked up at him through the glass of the greenhouse, puzzled, just as the figure stabbed her in the neck with what looked like a large syringe. Eric bolted towards the entrance and threw open the door, just in time to see the hooded assailant feeling out the back entrance, pushing over two of the beehives as they fled.

Eric briefly bent over Horatia, whose hand was clutched to her throat. Eric dialed 999 and didn’t wait for a response as soon as the call picked up. “This is Sergeant Chapman, I’ve just witnessed an attack at Bellows Farm.I’m going to pursue the assailant,” he said grimly, before launching up and running after the hooded figure, still visible on the edge of Horatia’s land.

He hadn’t quite accounted for the bees— they set on him as soon as he left the greenhouse, diving at his exposed face and throat. Eric could see the hooded figure flailing in the same way on the edge of the field, still trying to swat away the distressed insects. He ignored the pricks of pain on his neck and arms as he sprinted forward, gaining ground on the hooded figure as it ran through the trees.

“HONK,” something said to Eric’s left. He turned. “ Oh, you have _got to be kidding me_,” he hissed, as the goose suddenly appeared in the field next to him, waddling with another butter knife in its mouth.

For a moment Eric swore that the hooded figure looked back at the goose and then at him in a kind of confused solidarity, but then they were leaping forward and through an open gate in the tall wooden fence that bordered the roadside of Horatia’s property.

Eric realized what they were doing and put on a burst of speed, but the hooded figure had closed and locked the gate behind them, leaving Eric to scrabble over awkwardly, landing with a pained _oof _on the ground on the other side. When he looked up again after righting himself, the figure had disappeared.

“HONK,” said the goose behind him, waddling up to the gate with the butter knife wriggling menacingly in its mouth.

“Oh, shut up,” Eric snapped.

* * *

An hour later, the Piffling Police Force stood grimly around the body of Horatia Bellows, swathed in their riot gear for surface protection against the last few bees that were still buzzing around. Eric was grimly standing several feet back, his neck and arms swathed in calamine lotion and bacitracin. Dr. Edgware had arrived, sighed, and pulled Eric over for immediate triage from where he stood down the road, panting and still looking to the horizon for the hooded figure. “Please tell me it’s just the one this time,” Edgware said in an exhausted monotone.

“What?” Eric asked, still short of breath from his sprint.

“Body,” Dr. Edgware said. “It’s just the one body.”

Eric stared at him. “Yes,” he said shortly, turning on his heel. “It’s just the one.”

Horatia’s face and neck were swollen and purple, which Eric knew to be from whatever was in the syringe that the hooded figure had injected her with. The ruined honeycomb from the smashed hive oozed out onto the grass around the greenhouse like blood, smearing obscenely over their boots as they walked. Horatia’s face was frozen in a rictus of confusion and pain.

“So you’re telling me,” Wavering began, “that this _wasn’t _an accident?”

* * *

Eric strode into the mess room, shoving a pound coin into the swear jar preemptively. “Horatia Bellows was _fucking_ murdered!”

Georgie rolled her eyes. “Just like the Piffling Circus clowns?”

“Yes!”

“And Captain Sodbury?”

“No, actually.”

Georgie raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

“_Of course he fucking was_!” Eric yelled. Rudyard winced and added another pound coin to the swear jar. “Thank you, Rudyard,” Eric said more quietly.

“Oh, murder, murder, murder,” Georgie yelled back dismissively.“Change the fucking record!” Antigone put another pound in the swear jar box. “Thanks, Antigone,” Georgie added.

“I saw it!” Eric shouted. “I saw her get murdered, I was there!”

“What _were_ you doing there, Chapman?” Antigone asked quickly, clearly looking to dispel what was building to be a proper row.

Eric hesitated, his momentum interrupted. “I— um— I was getting a Japanese Peace Lily for Constable Funn for his birthday?”

Georgie’s face made several weird contortions but she didn’t say anything.

Antigone spoke up instead. “Did you get one for me as well, Chapman?”

Eric blinked. “What?”

“Well, it’s my birthday too!” Antigone said insistently, darting glances between Eric and Georgie.

Georgie grinned, relaxing slightly. “You do know how twins work, Chapman?”

Nigel leaned against the mess wall, smiling benevolently. “You know, Detective Crusoe, I would regard this in the light of a metaphor.”

Rudyard waved a hand at him. “No, Chapmanjust has a weird thing for plants.”

“It is kind of a metaphor, but that’s not the point right now,” Eric said, warming back up to his original pitch. “Horatia Bellows’ death was not an accidentand I can prove it!”

“What on earth is going on here?” Desmond asked owlishly, suddenly emerging from his office.

Nigel sighed fondly.

Eric rounded on him. “Horatia Bellows was murdered.”

“What?” Desmond asked, taken aback. “You mean, it wasn’t an accident? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, sir,” Eric said confidently. “And what’s more, I know who did it.”

“Oh dear,” Desmond said sadly. “I have quite a bad feeling about this.”

* * *

Vivienne Templar sat in an enormous velvet wing-backed chair like a throne, serenely surveying the members of the Piffling Vale Police who were awkwardly encamped across her living room. Georgie was sprawled across a chaise lounge, ignoring the smears of mud that she left over the beige floral pattern. Nigel had found Vivienne’s bookshelves as was engrossed in a large tome of what looked like sixteenth-century cartography.

“My goodness, detectives,” Vivienne said, laughing trilly and casually swirling an enormous mimosa. “You do seem adept at tracking half my garden indoors.”

“Apologies, Lady Templar,” Desmond said.

“Well, to what do I owe this . . . pleasure?” Lady Templar asked waspishly.

Eric stepped forward. “Vivienne Templar, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Horatia Bellows.”

Vivienne raised her eyebrows. “Good god, is Horatia dead?”

“Yes, as you well know,” Eric said heatedly.

“Well, why would I want to kill Horatia?” Vivienne asked, still with a tone of casual amusement. “I don’t suppose you think I’m involved in some sort of _honey trap_, officers.” She giggled at her joke into the silent room

Eric looked down at her stonily. “My suspicions were first aroused when I found out that your husband, Simon Templar, was intent on buying Captain Sodbury’s lighthouse. The lighthouse that was specially bequeathed by Piffling Vale to Captain Sodbury— or someone very much like him— over two hundred years ago. It’s now an extremely lucrative piece of coastline real estate, which the Village Council now has possession of.” Eric reached down to the ground and picked up a series of large pieces of pasteboard, held together by a neat round binder clip. “I took the liberty of looking through the village records, and saw that the Village Council— which you serve on— was planning to sell this property to your husband, as you can see here on this contract.”

“Does he have _diagrams_?” Antigone whispered to Rudyard, aghast.

Rudyard grinned. “I helped with those.”

Vivienne smiled at him with condescension. “My husband is an enterprising real estate developer, Sergeant Chapman. Surely that’s not a crime.”

“No, but murder is,” Eric said, theatrically flipping to his next page. “Which would explain how you knew about the murder far before we released any of the details to the public, and told Bill and Tanya not only who the victim was, but the particularly gruesome manner of his death. Which brings us to the clowns.” Eric looked over at his diagram and grimaced. “At least, these are supposed to be pictures of clowns.”

Rudyard bristled. “I think that’s very clear!”

“Sure thing. Anyway, the Piffling Circus was one of the few businesses that didn’t rent land from your husband. Marlena Magdalena told me that in the past, tenants had been unfairly evicted or gotten their rents raised if they weren’t in keeping with the ‘village’s rustic aesthetic.’”

Vivienne rolled her eyes. “If you choose to believe anything that woman says then I can’t help you, officers. She’s an absolute lunatic.”

“Watch it,” Georgie snapped, her dislike of Vivienne Templar temporarily outweighing her grudge towards Marlena.

“Yes,” Eric hedged.“while Marlena might be a bit . . . aggressive, she showed me clear records of financial malfeasance on the part of your husband’s company that had caused the Piffling Circus to seek alternate venues. Which they could afford until you killed all of their clowns.”

Vivienne Templar waved her hand like a lazy conductor. “Yes, very well Sergeant Chapman, tell me how I killed a car full of clowns.”

“As soon as I was at the scene of the accident, I could tell that something was wrong. The skid marks on the clown car didn’t match a distracted driver or a sudden tire blowout. Instead, both tires blew out at the same time, an event that is statistically near-impossible. Unless there was something that helped the car along the way. Something like a spike strip rolled across the road.”

Eric paused to flip his collection of drawings to an extremely rudimentary drawing of a flat line dotted with spikes. A clown was floating somewhere in the top right corner, frowning. Rudyard grinned.

“Ah, anyway,” Eric continued, “a spike strip rolled across the road would have produced the exact kind of skid marks that I observed at the scene of the accident. Moreover, it would cause the clown car to swerve and hit a tree at terminal velocity, not giving them a chance to pump the brakes. It would be difficult to procure such a spike strip, especially since they’re usually only available to law enforcement or general stores specializing in car maintenance. Indeed, the only place on this island where one might procure such a tool is Side Marlowe’s newsstand slash general store.”

Eric paused, “The very man,” he added, warming to his subject. “With whom I have been reliably informedyou are currently engaged in an extramarital affair!”

Vivienne suddenly coughed, nearly choking on her mimosa. “Sid?” she asked hoarsely. “You think I’m having an affair with Sid? I’m sorry Sergeant, this is too much. Multiple murder is one thing, but to suggest that I am engaging in — _relations_ with Sid Marlowe. This is an attack on my civil rights.”

“The pigeons must have been wrong,” Rudyard said, stricken. Eric closed his eyes and counted to three.

“I was finally convinced,” he continued, “when I spoke to Horatia Bellows, who told me that your husband had offered to buy out her bee farm. She mentioned that she was your cousin and was used to you and your husband’s, and I quote, ‘squirrelly tactics.’ She also mentioned that your husband was currently working on an extended deal in Australia.”

Eric paused and let that detail sink in.

“Yes?” Vivian asked impatiently.

“The Box Jellyfish,” Eric said triumphantly. “Is native to the Australian coast.”

The room sat in silence for a moment. “Okay,” Desmond said, rubbing her head. “Sorry Eric, but I admit I’m getting lost.”

Eric sighed. “The Box Jellyfish contains one of the most deadly venoms in the world. It can induce fatal hypokalemia within two minutes and leaves a blue-purple welt in its place. When administered intravenously rather than through a tentacle sting, the effect looks alarmingly similar to the anaphylactic shock sometimes brought on by bees.”

“Nerd,” Georgie said under her breath.

Vivienne Templar sighed, through she had the faintest air of unease. “I have no idea what this fascinating tidbit of information has to do with me.”

“I saw you,” Eric spat, turning on his heel to stare at her. “I saw you, dressed in a large black hood, stab Horatia in the neck with a syringe that was filled with what I’m pretty sure was the venom of a Box Jellyfish, procured for you by your husband. Dr. Edgware will confirm my suspicions about the venom in time. You knocked over her beehive to make her death appear accidental, and then you fled on foot. All to further your husband’s commercial stranglehold on this island.”

The room sat in silence again. Rudyard gave Eric an overconfident thumbs-up, and Eric tried very hard not the smile.

“These accusations are meaningless, Sergeant Chapman,” Vivian repeated smoothly, “unless you have some sort of evidence to back up your ludicrous claims.”

“That’s true,” Eric replied. “I would need physical proof. Such as, let’s say, a series of bee stings that you sustained during your attack this very day!” He strode forward and pushed up the sleeve of Vivienne’s cashmere sweater. Her forearm was totally unblemished.

“Hmm,” Eric said, and pushed up the other sleeve. Vivienne’s left arm was likewise free of any sort of bite or scab mark.

Georgie looked up at the ceiling. “This is really embarrassing.”

“Yes, I’m inclined to agree,” Vivienne replied. “Additionally, I can hardly be two places at once. I took the liberty of collecting the security footage of my property. You can clearly see me sunbathing all afternoon.” She gestured to a maid who wheeled in a small flatscreen and a stack of DVDs. “The videos are clearly stamped with the date and time, Sergeant Chapman. I know how you love your research.”

* * *

Eric sat in the police station, mechanically watching and re-winding the tapes that Vivienne had cheerfully handed to the police team before sending them on their way. He slumped in his desk chair, hitting his keyboard with one outstretched finger. 

“Chapman,” Rudyard began, “did you really get me a peace lily?”

“I did,” Eric said. “Unfortunately it’s been impounded as evidence.”

“Hmm,” Rudyard said ruminatively. “Maybe Desmond will still let me water it.”

“Yeah,” Eric said listlessly, hitting the fast-forward button again to review Vivienne’s backyard footage for the ninth time.

Eric felt like that he was losing grip of time, which might have also been the result of several nights of uneven sleep and several bee stings. His vision swam as he looked at the video surveillance, and he suddenly found himself standing in the locker room, his uniform top half-unbuttoned as he stared in a daze at the inside of his locker.

“Chapman,” Antigone said quietly, causing Eric to hit his head on the top of his locker in surprise.

“Antigone,” he hissed, more out of surprise than actual offense. “What are you doing in here?”

Antigone rolled her eyes. “Yes, god forbid I see you in your undershirt.” She immediately flushed like a lobster and rushed onward. “Look, I have something to tell you that I thought you’d want to hear alone.”

Eric frowned and leaned forward. “Yes?”

Antigone looked down at the pad of paper in her hand as if checking the one line of text she had already scribbled there. “Dr. Edgeware called,” she said haltingly. “There was nothing in Horatia Bellows’ system except for trace amounts of bee venom.”

Eric took a step back. “That’s impossible,” he said.

“I know,” Antigone said. “I know. But... it’s what it is.”

Eric was saved from responding by Rudyard, who rounded the corner and immediately wheeled as if struck. “Antigone!” he said, scandalized. “What are you doing in here?”

“Oh for christ’s sake,” Antigone hissed. “You’d think you were all having _orgies_ in here.”

Eric couldn’t tell if this was a genuine reaction or Antigone’s kind attempt to buy him some time, as Rudyard turned bright red and started a full-fledged rant that allowed Eric to sit back on his heels and process his reeling thoughts. He’d _seen _the figure stab Horatia with a syringe. He hadn’t hallucinated it, the person had been there. Horatia was dying long before the hives had been knocked over and the bees had swarmed into the greenhouse. Hadn’t they?

“—in a place of BUSINESS!” Rudyard bellowed, and Eric refocused. “I’ve got to go,” he said quickly, turning on his heel and striding towards the door, not even bothering to properly fold and distribute his uniform in his locker.

Rudyard tore himself away from the shouting match with his twin to follow Eric down the hallway. “Chapman!” He called. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Home,” Eric said tugging on his jacket half-heartedly.

“What do you mean, home?” Rudyard protested. “I thought we were solving a murder together. You can’t back out now!”

“There was no murder,” Eric said tonelessly. “Didn’t you hear? Everyone said so.”

“Since when have you listened to what everyone says?” Rudyard pointed out testily. “If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”

I wouldn’t need to jump,” Eric snapped. “You’d probably push me off the cliff and lie to everyone else about it.”

“That’s disturbingly accurate,” Rudyard said under his breath.

“Besides, the evidence checks out. Horatia had nothing in her system but trace amounts of bee venom,” Eric turned away.“Just go home, Rudyard.”

Eric strode away into the night, where it was pouring rain and horribly chilly. Eric pulled his coat more tightly around him and leaned into the frigid misery of the weather.

“No luck catching them killers then?” Miss Scruple called across the village quad as Eric stormed home.

“It’s just the one killer, actually!” Eric called back aggressively. He paused, letting the rain soak into his uniform shirt. _It’s just the one killer, actually. _He thought about how serene and confident Vivienne had looked as he laid out the facts of the case in her living room. “_I can hardly be in more than one place at once_,” she’d said.

“Wait,” he said to himself quietly. “Idea.”

For a moment Eric through about turning back and calling for Rudyard, who was probably back inside the station by now. Instead, he changed course towards the dimply lit facade of the Broken Tooth, knocking tentatively on the unlocked front doors before edging in.

“Hello Eric,” Agatha Doyle said, looking up from a package of Maltesers. “Goodness, you’ve been out there a while, haven’t you?”

Eric looked down at his shoes and pants, dripping sludgy water onto the worn wooden floors of the Broken Tooth, and grimaced. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he confessed. “Agatha, I know this is a little unorthodox, but would you mind just running through a theory with me? I feel like you’re the only one I can really talk to.”

Agatha sat down and folded her hands in her lap. “Of course, Eric. I’m flattered that you consider me a deductive equal, so to say.”

“Fantastic,” Eric said, throwing open his slightly soggy notebook. “I thought it was Vivienne Templar.”

“Yes, I heard about that,” Agatha said kindly.

“And I still think that,” Eric said firmly. “But . . .what if there were more than one?”

“More than one?”

“More than one killer, I mean.” Eric pressed. “What if Vivienne had help? I thought that she was acting alone, but if she wasn’t the hooded figure I saw killing Horatia Bellows, then she must have had help. Someone around here has bee stings all over their arms.”

Agatha was staring out the front window of her shop, looking contemplative and slightly sad.“Besides you, you mean,” she added.

Eric frowned. “Sorry, what?”

“Is it possible,” Agatha hedged, “that, in the swarm of bees, you didn’t see exactly what you thought you did?”

“I know what I saw.“

“Eric,” Agatha said forthrightly, without an ounce of pity. “The best lesson I ever learned, in my years as a detective, was that the simplest answer is almost always the right one.”

“Occam’s razor,” Eric said, frowning at the ground.

“Precisely. I know that this has been a difficult time for you, and that you’re trained to see a mystery everywhere, but Piffling isn’t like London. There isn't a murderer hiding behind every shrubbery.Sometimes accidents are just accidents.”

Eric sighed. “I know. I know. I’ve just been so focused on this case, ever since I got here. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am seeing connections when there aren’t any there.”

“Listen,” Agatha said, standing up. “I’m due to an event in an hour. Why don’t you think bout this overnight? If you’re still convinced, then we can start cracking the case together, first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Sure,” Eric said, rubbing at his forehead. “I’ll sleep on it. Thanks, Agatha. I really appreciate this.” He stood and walked slowly towards the door, rubbing at the bee stings that still throbbed through his wet shirtsleeves.

He started back towards his flat on foot, smiling weakly at Petunia Bloom as she passed him on the sidewalk with a bundle under her arm.

Eric would have indeed slept on his turbulent thoughts, and probably would have started the next morning by apologizing to his partner and having a more lucid discussion with Agatha Doyle. However, he was fated to do neither of those things, because as soon as Eric opened the door of his flat, he was hit in the head with a fireplace poker.

There were two reasons why Eric did not, in fact, die that very instant, or several instants later, of a broken skull. The first is that many years of training in close-quarters conflict made him jump back far enough that he was only grazed, sending him stunned to the ground but not breaking open his head like a soft-boiled egg. The second was a knee-high white blur that barreled past Eric’s sprawled body and dove at what sounded like the knees of Eric’s assailant, judging by the combined alarmed noises inside the room.

“What?” Eric groaned up to the sky, as he lay in the doorway in confusion. Or, at least he through he’d said ‘what.’ It probably sounded more like a sad gargle.

By the time that Eric got unsteadily back to his feet, what was now decidedly a goose was waddling quick back out of the doorway of Eric’s flat, taking off into the night without its customary butter knife in tow. Miss Scruple was picking herself back up from the floor with alarming spryness, clearly surprised but already in the process of reaching back for her fireplace poker. “M’sorry, Seargent,” she said, raising it over her head. She had several raised welts on her right arm that looked like bee stings.

Eric grabbed the first thing that was at hand— his peace lily, in its blue ceramic pot— and threw it at Miss Scruple’s head, while it collided and broke in a sudden puff of potting soil. Miss Scruple made a small, surprised noise and then fell to the ground, unconscious. Eric stood in the entryway of his flat, looked out at the dark street, looked in at the scene his foyer, and quickly closed the front door behind him.

Miss Scruple was wearing the same black hood that she’d assumedly donned this afternoon to kill Horatia Bellows; the hood was pulled back and cinched by a sturdy utility belt, which had a large, industrial-looking torch and a black walkie-talkie strapped into it. Eric had just grabbed the walkie when it suddenly began to transmit a squawk of static; he nearly dropped it in surprise. 

“Miss Scruple,” Vivienne Templar’s voice buzzed, distorted but unmistakable. “Miss Scruple, _are_ you copying?”

Eric looked down at the walkie in his hand, breathing heavily with adrenaline and vindication. He pressed the side button and tried to pitch his voice as high as possible. “Yes,” he croaked.

“Is everything okay? Sergeant Chapman has been taken care of?”

“Yes,” Eric croaked again.

“Oh, well done. Meet us to our site near the uranium mine, by the cliffs. We’ll be waiting for you.”

Eric tucked the walkie into his back pocket, grabbed his badge and his jacket, and was about to bolt from the room when he darted back to grab the rotary phone installed on his bedside table and dial the first person he could think of to help.

“Agatha,” he said quickly. “Look, something’s happened. I was right, Vivienne Templar just sent someone to kill me. I’m going to go and try to intercept them at the uranium mine. Can you— I’m gonna go, but can you go check on Rudyard?” Eric moved to put the phone down before adding “This is Eric, by the way,” and hanging up.

The village was eerily calm without the minor bustle in the town square; Eric noted that the Gull & Jerkin was closed, the windows of the pub totally dim. Even the park seemed quieter than usual, with no owls making belligerent hooting noises at dusk.

Eric had never been to the Piffling Uranium Mine, located as it was on the outskirts of the town, on the border of the Piffling Cliffs. Eric had enquired about it once on his first few days on patrol.

“I’m sorry, this village has a uranium mine?” Eric had asked in disbelief.

“There’s no need to take that tone, Sergeant Chapman,” Desmond had said reprovingly. “We’re very nearly a town, you know.”

“But— I mean, should we be patrolling it? Or, you know, worried about lung cancer?”

Rudyard had approached, rolling his eyes. “You’ll be fine, Chapman,” he said dismissively, “just stop breathing so loudly.”

Now Eric panted as he raced up the road towards the looming shadow of the mine, sidling behind a large oak tree when he heard the low murmur of voices. The uranium mine was a hulking plateau that opened into a dark, yawning cavern; the front was circled by a rusted wire fence that was perched ominously open. In front of the fence was a wide, scraggly field that loped off into the edge of the Piffling Cliffs, surprisingly close to where Eric and Rudyard had first encountered the goose. It seemed like five years ago, even though it was last week.

Eric craft forward towards the field, noticing for the first time that there was a small collection of lights hovering in the center.

“_Bonum Comune Comunitatis_” they chanted tonelessly. “_Bonum Comune Comunitatis_.”

Eric had, at the outside, been expecting maybe two or three people— perhaps Vivienne Templar had yoked Sid Marlowe into her murderous scheme along with Miss Scruple. There was an entire ring of people sitting around a wide, circular table, dressed in black hooded capes and carrying torches. Eric could make out Vivienne Templar and Sid Marlowe, but also Bill and Tanya from the Gull & Jerkin, Petunia Bloom, and — was that Dr. Edgeware?

“Oh my god,” Eric said quietly to himself. “It’s the whole Village Council.”

“Alright, alright,” Vivienne Templar said, waving impatiently and waving for the chanting to desist. “That’s enough. We’ll begin with Bill, he has a quick announcement to make.”

Bill beamed at the small group seated around the stone table. “Tanya and I are thinking of starting a pub quiz night at the Gull and Jerkin! Members of the Council play for free.” There was a smatter of interesting humming.

“Thank you, Bill. You’ll all be glad to hear,” Vivienne Templar continued crisply. “That the tenacious Sergeant Chapman has been taken care of. Bill will find the Sergeant in his apartment tomorrow morning— checking in on him after a heavy night of drinking at the Gull and Jerkin, you know— having tragically fallen in the shower and broken his neck.”

There was a wave of approving nods and light applause.

“Now, with the dispatch of the Sergeant,” Vivienne continued blithely, “we’ll be able to focus on our pursuit of our enemy the goose, who has been suspiciously quiet as of late. Nothing will stand in our way.”

“Oh, I beg to differ, Lady Templar,” Eric announced, stepping into the clearing. Several members gasped or coughed in surprise. Petunia Bloom looked up from where she was taking what looked like meeting notes and frowned disapprovingly.

“Oh, dear,”Vivienne said, sighing. “It seems we have visitors.”

“Sergeant Eric Chapman,” Eric said, presenting his badge. “Piffling Police Service. I’m arresting you all on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.”

There was a wave of chuckles from the hooded figures seated around the table. “Does this go in the minutes, Vivian?” Petunia Bloom asked, looking up from her notebook.

“No, Petunia, it doesn’t go _in the minutes_,” Vivian hissed. “Just— mark a short recess.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Eric said. “I’m going to need you all to come with me.”

Vivienne laughed, and there was something new and sharp in her expression that Eric had never seen before. “Alas, Sergeant Chapman,” she said, as the hooded members around the table suddenly brandished an alarming collection of knives, scythes and one particularly lethal-looking cosh, “I’m afraid that it is you who will come with us.”

“Ah,” Eric said intelligently, backing up from where he was standing at the edge of the clearing. He turned and sprinted towards the looming shadow of the uranium mine, hearing the clank of metal weaponry behind him as the hooded figures gave chase.

Eric had held the Met’s record in the 800-meter sprint from 2016-2017, so he should have been able to outrun a group of middle-aged pub owners, shopkeepers, and lazy socialites without a problem, no matter how alarmingly spry some of them had turned out to be. However, the Met’s 800m sprint event was not usually held in a uranium mine. Eric had no sooner bolted inside its entrance than he stumbled and nearly fell down the dark abyss of a mine shaft, arms wheeling madly and he staggered backward. The distant shine of the Village Council’s torches grew larger and brighter “Whew,” Eric said to himself bracingly, “near miss,” just as the floor gave way under him.

He landed hard on his hands and knees in what looked like an underground passageway, a narrow and dusty corridor. Eric didn’t have a lot of experience with Uranium mines, but this one looked fairly permanently out of use; besides a stray pickaxe, the corridor was almost entirely deserted.

Almost entirely, as Eric found out when he turned around and nearly tripped over a pile of semi-decomposed corpses.

“Oh my god,” Eric gasped, moving backward and putting an arm over the bottom half of his face, either to muffle the smell or to prevent himself from vomiting onto the stone floor. At least two of the more desiccated corpses, the ones that were almost entirely skeletons, wore ‘PIFFLING HASH BASH ’15’ tee shirts that draped in rags over gaping rib cages. A newer corpse still had a single red nose attached to a face whitened with makeup and still clutching a line of colored scarves.

“Oh no no no,” Eric said, still crawling backward. He collided with something and immediately recoiled, springing upwards and back. Turning, he saw the fresh body of a man with the same swollen purple face as Horatia Bellows, dressed in a long white apron that advertised “Jerry’s Bakery” on the front.

Eric pushed up to his feet and ran down this new corridor, jumping over Jerry’s corpse and sprinting towards a faint beacon of moonlight at the end of the dark tunnel. He emerged through a dank stone staircase, pushing aside ropes of cobwebs to emerge, gasping, onto the east side of the field that bordered on the uranium mine. He was only meters from the cheerful danger signs that marked the edge of the Piffling Cliffs, and the sound of the ocean that faintly echoed up from them. Eric took a moment to cough and shake on the ground before looking up to see the torchlights of the Village Council converge in a semi-circle around him, slowly walking over from different parts of the mine to flank him in an ominous hooded line.

“Stop this,” Eric spat, pausing before he moved too close to the precipice of the Piffling Cliffs. “You’re killing dozens of people, for what? Some land? This is madness.”

“No, Eric,” a measured voice said, and Agatha Doyle stepped toward him, illuminated garishly in the light of the Council’s torches. “This is good governance.”

“What?” Eric gasped, putting his hands on his knees. “Agatha, I— no, I don’t understand.”

“I know,” Agatha said calmly. “I used to be like you, Eric. I left Piffling and served as a police officer in the city. I believed in the balance of the law. But Piffling has a different balance; it always has. Indeed, you must have noticed that things— well, they get a bit eerie, so to say. When I came back, I realized that the island was in chaos. Any balance that might have existed between the human and the supernatural was gone.”

“What?” Eric asked, still looking aghast at Agatha. “Wait, so — so this has nothing to do with taking over their properties?”

Vivienne Templar rolled her eyes as best she could under her enormous black hood. “Well, yes, that’s an added bonus,” she said. “I’m hardly a purist like Agatha, there needs to be something in it for me.” She scowled. “I’d also like to make a note that I am _not _having an affair with Sid Marlowe.”

“Oh for heaven's sake, Vivienne, this is hardly the time,” Agatha chastised her. “As I was saying, I returned from my jaunt in the city fo find the island in chaos, and Funn Funerals was one of the centers of this dark energy. For goodness’ sake, a _uranium mine_ had appeared next to the Piffling Wood. The owl sanctuary had gone totally feral. The Village Council as it stood, had ceased to be any kind of check on the island; the Funns themselves were on it.” Agatha paused. “But, to be forewarned is to be forearmed,” she added wryly. “And several blocks of C4 from Petunia Bloom’s mainland connections certainly helped.”

“So you _blew up their house_?” Eric asked in disbelief. “You killed the Funns?”

“We did what was necessary,” Bill said defensively. “And, you know, according to the paperwork it was a gas main leak.”

“And then we continued to do what was necessary,” Agatha added. “We’ve been protecting thisIsland from harmful forces for years.”

“How was Captain Sodbury a harmful force?”

“Captain Sodbury had ceased his watch,” Dr. Edgeware said with a hoarse intensity that belied his exhaustion. “He made a deal with the Village Council, and he broke it.”

“Not to mention he was a terrible queue jumper,” Sid Marlowe interjected. “Good riddance, in my opinion.”

“And you saw that thing that calls itself a circus,” Vivienne Templar added.“If anything was contributing to the supernatural side of the island, it was that bunch of freaks.” There was a low murmur of agreement from the hooded group.

“Horatia was the hardest,” Agatha admitted, looking genuinely aggrieved. “She simply knew too much. She was never interested in intervening in the village affairs, but when push came to shove, she would have sided with you. So, you know, we had to push back. Shame about that honey. I’ll never get a supplier as good.”

“But— but why did you kill Jerry?” Eric asked desperately. “He was one of you!”

Agatha sighed. “Jerry was regrettable, but he violated our most basic tenet. He acted on his own in flagrant disobedience of council rulings.”

“What? What did he do?”

“He tried to kill Rudyard Funn,” Sid Marlowe said, leaning on his scythe. “Which, fair, we’ve all thought about slipping Rudyard arsenic.”

“Rudyard Funn is not a threat,” Agatha said severely. “We removed those children from their parents before they could turn out like them. If, one day that changes, the Village Council will of course intervene. Jerry acted out of personal malice, not for the greater good.”

“_The greater good_,” the group echoed again. Chapman gritted his teeth.

“Jerry’s actions were rash and shortsighted,” Agatha continued. “I could have told him that poison wouldn’t work on that boy. The Island likes him too much. Sergeant Chapman, I think you saw the untended consequences of that poisoning. Thank you, by the way, for intervening there. It wouldn’t do to have him tripping around the park like a sauced-up mallard.”

“I don’t understand,” Eric repeated.

“Yes, well, we hoped that we’d be able to ease you into it a bit more,” Agatha said ruefully. “We were hoping you’d be a little less—”

“Energetic,” Dr. Edgeware offered wearily, leaning on his cosh like a crutch.

“I really did have high hopes for you, Eric,” Agatha said solemnly. “I’m sorry that it needs to turn out like this.”She nodded at a figure who was striding out of the shadows, joining the hooded crew and dressed in a familiar uniform.

Eric had experienced several terrible things in his life. He’d been stabbed once, through the hand, by a drunk and disorderly mall Santa Claus. He’d been more or less abandoned by his parents, who sat in their respective posh townhouses, totally indifferent to the son they’d had to try and repair a failing marriage. He’d been left or betrayed in several relationships and told unkind things to his face. Most of these paled in comparison to the experience of seeing his partner appear on the cliffside, looking awful and somber and very unsurprised by the chorus of hooded figures behind him.

“Rudyard,_ no_,” Eric said, horrified.

“Sorry, Chapman,” Rudyard said quietly, putting a hand on his chest. “But I think this is for the best.”

Eric was still so frozen in shock and confusion that for a moment he just stood there, looking down at Rudyard’s hand on his chest like it was a confusing piece of evidence that he hadn’t understood yet. He didn’t realize Rudyard was pressing forward until he felt gravity lurch behind him and took an involuntary step back. His foot hit air and Eric’s whole body spasmed in a sudden and fatally overdue wave of adrenaline as he fell backward, his eyes still locked on the drawn face of his partner until he dropped and disappeared from view.

Everyone on the cliffside listened, but the crashing waves below muffled any sound of a thump or cry.

“Well that’s that sorted,” Agatha said briskly. “Rudyard, do you need any help dealing with the body?”

“No,” Rudyard said tonelessly. “I want to do it on my own.”

“Capital. Sorry, my boy,” she said, patting Rudyard on the shoulder. “Next time they assign you a partner, do try to keep him off our tail, as they say, a little longer.”

“Seriously Rudyard,” Sid Marlow said. “It’s been like _two weeks_, mate.”

“Yes, I know,” Rudyard mumbled, turning away from the cliff’s edge.

“Alright, let’s pack it in,” Sid said, patting Dr. Edgware’s back with a force that nearly toppled the gaunt man. “All this work has been murder on my printing schedule for the paper.” He chuckled a little at the unintended joke.

One by one the members of the Piffling Vale Village Council turned away, heading past the gate of the uranium mine and down the hill back to the village center, until Rudyard was the only one standing there, still looking out on the dark horizon with a look of exhausted resignation.

* * *

Fifteen feet below where the Village Council had just been standing, Eric Chapman was lying on his back, both literally and metaphorically stunned, when the end of a rope softly hit him in the face. He groaned and twitched his face defensively.

“Come on, Chapman,” a familiar voice hissed quietly at him, as the rope poked him in the nose again. “Now is not the time to be resting. Grab the rope.”

“Rudyard? What the hell are you playing at,” Eric whispered hoarsely, trying to sit up. “Ugh, I think I broke a rib.”

“You fell fifteen feet, Chapman, don’t be dramatic,” Rudyard blustered. “At least you weren’t foolish enough to make any noise. I know how loudly you breathe sometimes.”

“Dramatic?” Eric hissed, dramatically. “_Dramatic_?!? You just tried to _kill_ me.”

“No Chapman, if I was trying to kill you I wouldn’t have pushed you literally in the only place on the cliffside that has a hidden embankment that we had conveniently discussed before, would I?”

“It’s funny the way that that very specific logical sequence didn’t occur to me as I was falling off a cliff,” Eric snapped.

“Yes, that’s why I’m the brains of this partnership. Come on, up you get.” Rudyard shook the rope at him insistently. “We’re on a bit of a schedule here.”

Between Rudyard’s questionable upper-body strength and Eric’s cracked ribs, they made slow and uneven progress before Eric heaved himself over the top of the cliff, gasping for breath and still clutching his side.

“I’m going to kill you,” Eric gasped, resting his forehead against the springy grass on the cliffside. “Eventually. Once everything stops spinning.”

“Well, you’re welcome,” Rudyard snapped, looking genuinely wounded. “If you didn’t notice, I did just save your life. “

“How could you do this to me?” Eric asked, turning on his side and leaning into the rage that was waiting patiently behind his general pain and feelings of confused dizziness. “This whole time we were working together, you were just lying to me about everything that was going on here?”

Rudyard looked at him oddly. “Chapman, what the hell are you going on about?”

“I mean that for the last two weeks, while I’ve been trying to solve these cases, you’ve been aiding and abetting this murder cult that calls itself a Village Council!” Eric shouted, realizing that he was making rather a lot of noise for a man who was supposed to be dead, and not caring

Rudyard looked a little alarmed. “Chapman, are you sure you didn’t hit your head down there? The only person that the Village Council wants to kill is you.” He frowned into the distance. “To be fair, I haven’t had a lot of time to ponder _why_ they want to kill you. Miss Scruple just threw me in a sack and then I got out in the middle of a murder conspiracy I was being inducted into. Most of this was improvisation.”

Eric was struck dumb for a few moments, caught between begrudging pride that Rudyard had put together an extremely risky but fairly effective plan to foil the Village Council in what was probably about two hours and despair at whatever elliptical logic Rudyard was employing to stand firm in his denial.

Rudyard frowned and grabbed him by the forearms, pulling him up onto unsteady feet. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get you to the docks on time. Dr. Edgware has a boat he never has time to use, and I’m supposed to have your body posed in some sort of jogging accident by morning, so they’ll begin to suspect that something is up in a few hours.”

Eric started. “I’m not _leaving_.”

Rudyard strode past him. “Of course you’re leaving. You’re supposed to be dead.”

You can’t be serious,” Eric asked, following his partner down the winding stairs of the Piffling Cliffs that led to the docks. “Rudyard, don’t you wonder why the accident rate in Piffling Vale is so high? Because Agatha and the other members of the Village Council are murdering people and making it look like accidents!”

“Now look here, they do some weird things, and their meeting hours are honestly appalling, but they’re not _murdering_ people,” Rudyard said, though his tone was a little uncertain. “I mean, apart from you. I guess you’re a special case.”

“I just saw a mass grave in the uranium mine!” Eric hissed. “Jerry’s in there, with a few more circus members and some other decomposing bodies, who, I don’t know, probably did other vaguely supernatural things!”

Rudyard stopped short, and Eric nearly ran into his back.“Are you positive, though? To be fair, we don’t have a working funeral home anymore, I don’t know how well Dr. Edgeware is set up for—”

“They were murdered, Rudyard. They didn’t just run out of coffins and use a uranium mine as an impromptu burial ground, Jesus _Christ_.”

Rudyard sighed and slumped down on a tree stump that dotted the side of the seaside path. “I know,” he said, sounding uncharacteristically quiet and grave.

“You need to help me,” Eric insisted, still clutching the side of his torso where yep, he had definitely cracked a few ribs. “We have to take them down.”

Rudyard sighed. “I can’t.”

“ You realize that they killed your parents!” Eric shouted. “They literally blew up your childhood home!”

Rudyard wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Maybe they had to. Maybe it was for— “

“If you say t_he greater good_, I’m going to scream,” Eric said hoarsely. “How can you think that?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, Chapman” Rudyard protested, putting his face in his hands. “Things here, they’re different.”

“You shock me,” Eric said flatly. “There was a two-hundred-year-old lighthouse keeper. The circus is full of homicidal elephants and magic acrobats. You can talk to animals; Horatia had some sort of bee thing. Things are weird here. I’ve been saying that since I got here. That doesn’t mean that they deserve to die.”

“That’s not how things work.”

“I don’t care how things work!” Eric hissed. “I’ll _unwork_ them!”

Rudyard sighed. “No you won’t Chapman,” he said ruefully. “You’ve already died.” He rose up from the tree stump where he had been sitting and patted Eric’s shoulder. “Let’s get you back to London,” he said with forced cheer and started back down the path.

Eric followed his partner mutely to the docks, still reeling in a combination of shock and what might very well have been a minor concussion. “Jerry poisoned you, by the way,” he added as they worked to take the tarp off Dr. Edgware’s motorboat. “That’s why Agatha had him killed. I guess it didn’t work the way it was supposed to, but that’s why you don’t remember the night we met.”

Rudyard paused with an overflowing armful of neon blue tarp. “You know,” he said wryly, “that’s actually the least surprising thing I’ve heard today.”

Eric snorted in response. Rudyard poked suspiciously at the boat’s rusted motor until Eric gently shouldered him out of the way. He opened his mouth to deliver an instructive lecture on advanced mechanics before thinking the better of it. “Where am I supposed to be going in this anyway?” He asked instead.

“I don’t know Chapman, do I look like a seafarer?” Rudyard snapped. “It’s thirty minutes to Weymouth, just go in the opposite direction from the shore until you see land. Surely you got some sort of nautical skills badge while running London.”

“Right,” Eric said, too exhausted to even point out that the Met didn’t work like the Scouts. The two worked in silence until the boat was bobbling, untethered and purring, on the side of the dock.

“Come with me,” Eric finally said desperately. “We can go to London. We can come back with the full force of the Metropolitan police. We can do it together. You and me, partners.”

“They’ll have cleaned up the mine by the time you get back,” Rudyard said, stepping back from the boat and ignoring Eric’s question entirely. “There won’t be any evidence left. They are, if evil and apparently homicidal, an incredibly efficient group.” He paused for a moment. “Antigone and Georgie—”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Eric said, cutting him off and clearing his throat. “I know you can’t come. Just— what are you going to do if they decide that you’re next?”

Rudyard sighed. “They won’t. I think. At least, Agatha wouldn’t.”

Eric struggled with the desire to tell him that Agatha absolutely would, that her paranoia against the supernatural might start to overshadow her affection for Rudyard. He suspected that Rudyard already knew. “Take care of yourself,” he said instead.

Rudyard nodded and started to speak several times before stopping himself. “Well, don’t fall in,” he finally said, gesturing at the Channel churning against the cliffs beside them. “I’ve already put in all that work saving your life tonight.”

“Right,” Eric said. For a moment he thought about telling Rudyard that the goose had probably saved his life tonight. For some reason, it seemed like an inappropriate way to say goodbye. “Okay,” he said, turning back towards the boat’s front controls and gunning the engine. Eric didn’t look back towards the shore as he peeled away from the Piffling docks and started towards the open waters, the noise of the waves crashing against the Piffling Cliffs receding behind him.

It was eerily monotonous, plowing through the dark water of the Channel. Eric barely had to keep a hand on the steering mechanisms, staring forward monotonously as the blinking lights of Weymouth got slightly closer. It was hard to measure time traveling like this, though Eric had gotten stung by bees and hit on the head with a poker and fallen off a cliff and into a mass grave. It was a miracle that he was still standing.

Staring at those blinking lights, Eric tried to imagine what his life might be like once he reached Weymouth; he could probably still try to recover his flat in London. There was that coffeeshop near his place where he liked to read up on the latest issue of _Comparative Physics Weekly_ on Saturday mornings just to be around people. There would certainly be a net lack of geese trying to menace him with a butter knife, or possibly save his life.

“Oh, _fuck this_,” Eric said suddenly, and spun the motorboat around in the water, reversing his course and gunning the engine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY TO AGATHA DOYLE. I swear I will write her a POV fic as an apology where she and Horatia are happy and make honey candy together. I needed a good central villain and Vivienne just doesn’t have the leadership skills. 
> 
> I'm currently on week three of quarantine, so please provide me with human interaction in the comments, if only to make fun of me for having Eric Chapman leave Piffling Vale and then saying 'fuck this' and turning around in every WO fic I've written this year. It's a good trope!

**Author's Note:**

> It took me a bit to figure out an organic blend of canon!Eric Chapman and Nicholas Angel!Chapman, but then I watched that one scene in Hot Fuzz where Angel runs into the supermarket alone and Danny yells “he knows what he’s doing!” before Angel gets thrown outside through a plate glass window, and I was like, “ah, there he is, there’s Chapman.”


End file.
